Madonna

A sensual woman with long flowing dark hair leans back with closed eyes and parted lips in an attitude of ecstasy, a red halo above her head, swirling lines surrounding her. Munch fuses the sacred and the erotic, casting the Madonna as a figure of desire, conception, and mortality at once. Now in Oslo's National Gallery, his Madonna is among the most provocative images of the Frieze of Life - woman as life-giver and femme fatale, holy and carnal together, the traditional icon of purity transformed into a charged Symbolist meditation on love, sex, and death.