Woman with long Hair

This early etching by Munch of a woman with long hair and exposed breasts is a precursor to one of his most famous lithographs, The Sin (Woll 198) in 1902. Munch’s representations of women are highly ambiguous. Other etchings with similar compositions from around this period, such as Madonna (Woll 11) and The Woman I (Woll 21), are explicitly sexual in their depiction of the female body. In contrast, and much like The Sin, the present work seems more of a psychological study, with the woman’s eyebrows furrowed in thought, and the closely cropped composition focuses more on the expression on her face and hair than her exposed breasts.

For a woman to have her hair unfurled during the 19th century was considered equivalent to nakedness, yet this figure seems to embody the suffering associated with love rather than the feelings of desire and temptation traditionally associated with such an image. It is instructive in this context to consider the etching The Woman and the Heart (Woll 55), which was originally etched onto the same plate as Woman with Long Hair. The two works were conceived alongside one another and were frequently printed together even after the plate had been cut in two. The Woman and the Heart shows a woman holding a large heart away from her body, the blood dripping onto the ground and onto her feet. It is unclear if the heart is her own, or whether the women on the two parts of the plate are the same figure, yet they clearly both signify the suffering associated with love.