Auction Wednesday December 12 2018 at 19:30
Munch, Edvard(1863-1944)
Woman in the Moonlight. The Voice

Woodcut printed in black on thin Japan paper
Sheet: 320-328x163-168 mm Image: 251x93 mm
Signed in pencil lower right: Edv Munch

1898
Woll 129 a).
Printed by Lassally probably after 1906.

Provenance:

Walther Halvorsen.

Estimate
NOK 600,000–800,000USD 70,500–94,100EUR 61,800–82,400

Auctioned Wednesday December 12 2018 at 19:30

Unsold

LITERATURE: Arne Eggum: Edvard Munch. Paintings, Sketches and Studies, 2. edition, Oslo 1986.
Gerd Woll: Edvard Munch 1895 first year as a graphic artist, exhibition catalogue The Munch Museum, Oslo 1995.

In Woll 1995, under cat.no. 45: "The Voice", drawing, 415x500, it says what the artist wrote underneath the image in pencil:

"Dine øine ere store som den halve himmel når du står nær mig og håret dit har guldstøv og munden ser jeg ikke - ser blot at du smiler." (Your eyes are as large as half the sky when you are standing near me, and your hair has golden dust and your mouth I do not see - I only see you smiling). Woll, p. 82.

In his striving to convey ... the "most subtle visions of the soul", Munch produces a set of established pictorial signs and symbols which he uses to suggest strong and often composite feelings. A fascinating pictorial sign of this kind, and one that is often used, is the moon with its lunar column. For itself it suggests erotic associations, but with a passive, despondent keynote. The light reflected on the sea, the lunar column, is just as real as the full moon itself. In a manner that is easy to grasp this sign marks the line of the horizon, and serves furthermore to link the motif to the picture surface, by ensuring that the eye is arrested and does not lose its way in an unspecified pictorial space. Eggum, p. 121-122.