Dali House

Happy Halloween from Edvard Munch and his “Vampire”, from 1894. Actually, Munch didn’t think he was painting a scene from Bram Stoker. He told his pal Adolf Paul, who’d just dropped in to his Berlin studio, to kneel down next to his red-haired model and rest his head against her. She bent down and pressed her lips to his neck.

Munch titled the finished piece “Love and Pain”, because it was about love’s power struggle, and it was one of his series on love (”The Voice” and “The Kiss” being others) that he was compiling for his sweeping “Frieze of Life” masterwork.

But when he showed this one in public, the Polish poet Stansilaw Przybyszeski, an anarchist and, some thought, an occultist, swore he saw a vampire.

“A broken man,” he reckoned, “rolling about in the bottomless pit, weakly, powerlessly, rejoicing in the fact that he can roll about as weakly as a stone … He cannot free himself from the pain, and the woman will always be sitting there, forever biting with a thousand vipers’ tongues.”

Whew!

They were keen in those days on stories about unleashed female libido. Munch came up with something a little more genteel, though the colours are rather titillating.

It’s “just a woman kissing a man on the neck”, he insisted, and when it went on show as part of “The Frieze of Life” in 1918, he called it “A Woman Kissing the Back of a Man’s Neck”. But the public wanted a vampire, and that’s inevitably what they got.

He did four versions. One is in Gothenburg’s Museum of Art, two others at the Munch-Museet in Olso, and this one stayed in private hands. Sotheby’s is selling it on Monday as part of its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York. How much? That’s probably the scariest part — the catalogue simply says prospective buyers can ask.

THIS JUST IN: Munch’s “Vampire” sold for $38 million. Yes, gulp!

Next, a really horror story, having to do with Andy Warhol’s “Dracula” from 1981, not to be confused with “Andy Warhol’s Dracula”, his oddball 1974 film. Who’s the bloke at the bottom right? His model, as seen in Andy’s Polaroid snap.

Now, according to the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, a unit of the US government formed in 1868 by President Ulysses S Grant to combat the scourge of vampirism flooding America with the influx of European immigrants (300,000 by the turn of that century), Warhol wasn’t shot by Valerie Solanis on June 3, 1968. No, not at all.

He was bitten by a female vampire, known at the Factory as “Vox Superstar”, a mentally disturbed young woman named Olga Kulbis.

FVZA agents learned that Vox wanted to make a real vampire movie with Andy, and they had commenced filming when the attack took place.

His screams aroused Factory staff, who chased Vox onto the roof, where she leapt 30 feet to a neighbouring building and fled. The agents soon tracked her down, though, and that same night shot her dead in a stakeout. This was, of course, covered up to keep the public from panicking.

“For the rest of his life,” the agency’s website says, “Warhol took to wearing turtlenecks in public to hide the scars on his neck.”

Other than the time he posed in drag for the mugshot above, of course.