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. See the rest.

A bit more on the Artist.Ranking (A.R) system mentioned in our Rousseau biography, as found at ArtFacts.net.

As mentioned, lonely old Henri is currently ranked #724 with a bullet on this overtly mercenary chart, which arranges 62,436 artists by volume of exhibitions over the last five years.

Picasso is #1, Cezanne 32 and Monet 62, just to grab some examples.

“The basis of the A.R thinking is the so-called economy of attention (after a book from Georg Franck),” the website explains. “Franck says that attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that works with the same mechanisms as capitalism. Capitalist, or economic, behaviour is based on property, lending money and charging interest.

“For Franck, the curator (eg the museum director or the gallery owner) acts as a financial investor. The curator/investor lends their property (their exhibition space and their fame) to an artist from whom they expect a return on their investment in the form of more attention (reputation, fame etc).”

Here’s the top 10 after Picasso: Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, Henri Matisse, Edward Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.* See the rest.

Considering the noisemaker of a painting we’re talking about, the Norwegian cops are staying pretty damn quiet about how they managed to get back Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” on August 31, a full two years after it was snatched in broad daylight from the Munch Museum in Oslo.

Hopefully the jumpy Scandinavian press, now that they’re no longer busy doodling cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, can get to the bottom of this mystery within a mystery. Most likely a ransom was paid, but if so, it only deepens the mythology swarming like irked bees around Eddie’s freaky little canvas.

It is, after all, a potent symbol of the frightfulness of our times (and perhaps of Munch’s a century ago), and it was no small irony that Norwegians treated the theft of this national treasure as as terrorist act.

But for now, at least, all the cops are saying is that they recovered “The Scream” and “The Madonna”, seen above, the other Munch painting stolen with it, in better-than-expected condition, a ragged corner and water damage to the former and some small rips and gouges in the latter, all of which can be repaired.

If “The Scream” — or “Skrik” as it’s known in Norway (literally, “yikes!”) – weren’t such an important symbol, this would have been one zany comedy from start to finish.
See the rest.