Vampire (1894). Oil on canvas. 100 x 110. Sale $38,200,000 (2008, Sotheby's, N08485, 21). Love and Pain is a painting by Edvard Munch, It has also been called Vampire, though not by Munch. Munch painted six different versions of the subject in the period 1893-1895; three versions are at the Munch Museum in Oslo, one is at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, one is owned by a private collector and the last one is unaccounted for. He also painted several versions and derivatives in his later career. The painting shows a woman with long flame-red hair kissing a man on the neck, as the couple embrace. Although others have seen in it a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace-her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin, Munch himself always claimed it showed nothing more than just a woman kissing a man on the neck. The painting was first called Vampire by Munch's friend, the critic Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Przybyszewski saw the painting on exhibition and described it as a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire's face. A version of the painting was stolen from the Munch Museum on 23 February 1988. It was recovered later the same year, when the thief contacted the police. In 2008, at a Sotheby's auction, an 1894 version of the painting sold for 38.2 million dollars and set the world record for the auction of a Munch painting. In 1895, Munch created a woodcut with a very similar theme and composition, known as Vampyr II. In 1916-1918, Munch reused the composition in a different setting for two paintings called Vampire in the Forest and Vampire, currently in the collection of the Munch Museum.
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