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This motif dates back to the Middle Ages, but has been repeated and developed throughout the history of art thereafter. A precursor of the strong focus on the erotic that we find in Munch's engraving Death and the Maiden is Albrecht Dürer's portrayal of death as a skeleton, part-seducer, part-rapist. Yet in Munch the roles are reversed; it is the woman who is the seducer, and the man who allows himself to be ensnared by her, loses his integrity and his creative powers - and dies, if not physically, then figuratively. Perhaps this mirrors the man's scepticism vis-à-vis the sexually and socially emancipated woman - the femme fatale in various guises was a popular motif in literature as well as art at this time of change and upheaval - yet above all it reflects Munch's own horror at the fact that an all-consuming relationship with a woman should stand in the way of his artistic vocation. The link between love and death was graphically real for Munch, as it was for many other artists of the age. Woman was a creature who, by virtue of her bodily cycle, was closely bound up with life and death, and who therefore brought man face to face with his own transience. Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic place the motif in a contemporary feminist context. By substituting their own bodies for the maiden they take on the female role that was so alarming and novel in Munch's time. In a ritualised episode, life and death become acquainted with one another and the woman confirms the cyclical power of her sex. These two artists also reiterate Munch's analysis of himself and his relation to his surroundings. His role as outsider in the bourgeois society of the day becomes a parallel to the female artist's situation in a society dominated by man. At a more general level, the work of these two artists deals with the confrontation of that most alien of forces, death. In this, they take up the threads of Munch's work The Dance of Death, in which he portrays himself in a tight embrace with a skeleton. |
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