After seven decades in the hands of a private art collector Edvard Munch’s famous work Vampire, normally held to be a thematic cousin to his more famous The Scream, will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York at the start of November. Its widely anticipated that Vampire is likely to go for around £19 million, which would break the previous record for a Munch work at auction (currently Girls on a Bridge holds the record at £16.5 million). Which is a lot of money but maybe its better going on this than Damien Hirst works… As the BBC notes Vampire was quite controversial when it was first unveiled, dealing, as many vampire-themed works do, in that curious mixture of love, sex, longing and pain and death, with some contemporary commentators also seeing it as an indicator of the growing liberation of women in Western society at the beginning of the 20th century.
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