Edvard Munch
Exactly 152 years ago, Edvard Munch was born. The artist has attained lasting fame for his paintings and prints - above all, most famously, The Scream - that expresses the isolation and anxieties of the modern condition.
Mermaid is little known outside a small circle of experts because it rarely had been displayed in museums or galleries. The Norwegian industrialist and collector Axel Heiberg commissioned Mermaid from Munch in 1896, when the artist was living in Paris, absorbing the city’s intellectual life, expanding his work as a printmaker. Like other avant-garde artists associated with the international Symbolist style, Munch was interested in depicting the emotions and fears of the human psyche. Themes of metamorphosis, anxiety, and desire imbue this large-scale mural, designed to fit under the sloping rafters of a great hall in the home of Heiberg in Lysaker, Norway.
The painting shows a beguiling mermaid lingering in a moonlit cove, seemingly in the process of transforming into a woman. She recalls Norse myths of mermaids as melancholy beings who love humans but cannot live comfortably on land. Munch was likely influenced by these traditional stories and by Lady from the Sea, a play by the great Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen that opens with a scene of an artist painting a mermaid in the brackish water of the shore. Originally, this painting is trapezoidal but I couldn't find a proper image. I hope you will forgive us as today we present only a detail (but the most important) from it!