Madonna (Munch)

Madonna is the usual title given to several versions of a composition by the Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch showing a bare-breasted half-length female figure created between 1892 and 1895 using oil paint on canvas.

The lithographic print of the composition is distinguished by a decorative border depicting wriggling sperm, with a fetus-like figure in its bottom left corner.

The affinity to Mary might as well be intended nevertheless, as an emphasis on the beauty and perfection of his friend Dagny Juel-Przybyszewska, the model for the work, and an expression of his worship of her as an ideal of womanhood.

Commenting on the lithograph version, he says that the "decorative border [is] composed of sperms trailing long wriggly filaments which meander round three sides of the image and end in a foetus-like pendant.

Munch used it in his Madonna to mitigate his assertion of female power; the gesture of defeat subtly checks the dark, overpowering force of Woman.

Male desire is literally transfigured into the undulating sperm framing the canvas, and the euphoric, ecstatic sexuality of the naked woman is described in serpentine brushstrokes.

Her closed eyes, like those of Beata Beatrix, distance and separate the subject of the painting from the spectator; this woman is inviolate, revelling in her closed-off auto-erotic sensuality.

Conservator Thierry Ford and photographer Børre Høstland at the Museum used infrared reflectography to show layers beneath the painting's surface.

The thieves forced the museum guards to lie down on the floor while they snapped the cable securing the paintings to the wall and escaped in a black Audi A6 station wagon, which police later found abandoned.

The following day Ingebjørg Ydstie, director of the Munch Museum, said the condition of the paintings was much better than expected and that the damage, including a 2.5 cm hole in the Madonna, could be repaired.

[14] On 15 February 2013, four Norwegian postage stamps were published by Posten Norge, reproducing images from Munch's art to recognise the 150th anniversary of his birth.