白邊5cm
※white space of Four sides: 5cm
Motif [Madonna / Edvard Munch]

The image of the Madonna is a recurrent theme in visual art. Western art history is full of paintings with this title. These are often depictions of the Virgin Mary, frequently cradling the infant Jesus in her arms or on her lap. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Raphael all created their versions of Jesus’ mother and painted their Madonnas. Munch’s Madonna is a radical departure from all earlier portrayals. The woman we see here is not a young virgin, but the complete opposite: a woman embracing the erotic on a par with men. Munch described the image as a ‘woman in a state of surrender – where she acquires the afflicted beauty of a Madonna’.

Sometimes he gave the image the title Woman Making Love, and he wrote a short text in connection with the image:
"The pause when the whole world stopped in its tracks
Your face encompasses all of the earth’s beauty
Your lips red like ripening fruit
separate as though in pain
The smile of a corpse
Now life offers death its hand
The chain has been linked which connects
The millennium of generations
That are deceased to the millennium of generations that are to come."