Art: The Master of the Anxious Eye

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Munch's art, or rather two aspects of the same castrating type, and neither bore a trace of hope. To Munch, women were forces, not social beings. A man was either rejected by a virgin or devoured by a femme fatale. The distant virgin was given her most concise form in The Voice, 1893. The silence of this columnar creature, matched with the solemn verticals of the tree trunks and the glistening phallic track of the moon reflected in the fjord, conveys an almost religious sense of inaccessible purity. Munch's second kind of woman is the femme fatale, the vampire who uses up men, the mantis who eats her mate. His sexual Liliths are the most compelling embodiments to be found in painting of a fear which, however irrational, seems built into the very nature of sexual struggle. In their anxiety and emotional claustrophobia, they are liberating — not because they propose a stereotype, but be cause they identify it with such sacrificial, unreserved frankness.

—Robert Hughes