Edvard Munch nature." He later described the personal anguish behind the painting, "for several years I was almost mad… You know my picture, 'The Scream?' I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again." In summing up the painting's effects, author Martha Tedeschi has stated: "Whistler's Mother", Wood's "American Gothic", Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" and Edvard Munch's "The Scream" have all achieved something that most paintings—regardless of their art historical importance, beauty, or monetary value—have not: they communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to almost every
Love and Pain (painting) in it "a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin," Munch himself always claimed it showed nothing more than "just a woman kissing a man on the neck". The painting was first called "Vampire" by Munch's friend, the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski. Przybyszewski saw the painting on exhibition and described it as "a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire's face." A version of the painting was stolen from the Munch Museum on 23 February 1988. It was recovered later the same year, when the thief