Name: Harpy
Brand: EDVARD MUNCH (1863-1944)
Price: 10000.00 USD
Availability: SoldOut

EDVARD MUNCH (1863-1944)
Harpy
lithograph, 1899, on Van Gelder laid paper, with a Fleur-de-Lys watermark, not signed, a good impression of this very rare print, trimmed slightly irregularly to or fractionally into the subject, a 10 mm. tear at the right sheet edge, mount- and tape staining along the sheet edges
Sheet 355 x 314 mm.

Provenance:
Christie's, London, 29 November 1988, lot 447 (£5,100)

References:
Schiefler 137
Woll 145

Please note this lot is the property of a private collector.

Conditions of Sale
FAQs
This lot is offered by Christie's eCommerce SA

Brought to you by

A Christie's specialist may contact you to discuss this lot or to notify you if the condition changes prior to the sale.

View condition report

Lot Essay

The 'battle of the sexes' is a central theme in Edvard Munch's oeuvre. Although a great innovator of artistic form, in sentiment he was very much a man of the fin de siècle. The motif of the femme fatale preying on helpless man was a pervasive theme in the art and literature of the end of the 19th century. Munch found a harrowing and powerful expression of this idea in the image of a harpy, a bird of prey with the head and body of a woman, about to sink her talons into the skeletal corpse of a man. As a subject, it is closely related to Munch's famous woodcut and painting of the Vampyre, the red-haired woman seeming to bite the neck of a man.

Impressions of this print are extremely rare. To our knowledge, the present impression is the only one to have been offered at auction within the last thirty years.