Martin Lawrence Galleries

About the Work

"Madonna and Self-Portrait w. Skeleton's Arm (After Munch) (FS.IIIA.62)" is an estate stamped screenprint on Lenox Museum Board created by Andy Warhol in 1984. The image size is 32 x 40" and the artwork is framed in a contemporary black frame. The artwork ships framed and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

Andy Warhol remains one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, not only for his pioneering work in Pop Art, but for his lifelong interrogation of death, repetition, beauty, fame, and artifice. While best known for his commercial and celebrity imagery - Campbell’s Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley - Warhol's late-career works reveal a more meditative, at times haunting, tone. The After Munch series, created just three years before his death, stands as a major example of this introspective and metaphysical phase.

In the unique screenprint Madonna and Self-Portrait with Skeleton’s Arm (After Munch) (FS.IIIA.62), (1984), Warhol engages in a rare and profoundly layered act of homage, appropriating the work of Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch, and in doing so, he invites the viewer into a deeply personal, psychological, and philosophical conversation that transcends time.

Each composition in this body of work is a unique variation, blending Warhol’s signature Pop aesthetic with the existential weight of Munch’s original imagery. In Madonna and Self-Portrait with Skeleton’s Arm, two of Munch’s most emotionally charged images — Madonna and his lesser-known Self-Portrait with Skeleton’s Arm — are fused into a single composition, and filtered through Warhol’s own fascination with mortality, fame, and religious iconography.

In Madonna we find a sensuous and spiritual rendering of a woman in ecstasy, her pose evoking both erotic surrender and religious reverence. Munch’s Madonna embodies the dualism of sanctity and sexuality. In Self-Portrait with Skeleton’s Arm (1895), we are confronted with an eerie portrait in which Munch gazes directly at the viewer, a skeletal forearm beneath him like a memento mori, which conjures a chilling emblem of death's proximity. The resulting combination is a disquieting yet elegant image, infused with a tension between beauty and decay, intimacy and extinction.

Both works demonstrate Munch’s obsession with liminality — the threshold between life and death, sex and suffering, creation and destruction. His images don’t just depict emotion; they embody psychological states, making the invisible visible. Motherhood and mortality intersect in Madonna, while art and death converge in Self-Portrait with Skeleton’s Arm. In each, Munch merges personal trauma (he lost his mother and sister early in life) with broader philosophical concerns, turning every gesture and object into a metaphor for the impermanence and intensity of existence.

In appropriating Munch, and bringing these two powerful works together, Warhol highlights a kindred voice, and in doing so turns the gaze inward. This is not simply homage, but a dialogue between two artists separated by nearly a century, each grappling with personal demons, religious symbolism, and existential dread, through radically different aesthetic languages.

Madonna and Self-Portrait with Skeleton’s Arm (After Munch) (FS.IIIA.62) is an expression of Warhol’s late-career vulnerability, spiritual inquiry, and intellectual ambition - a fusion of his fascination with beauty, death, and the constructed image. This print functions as a curated dialogue between two visionary minds, distilled into one silkscreen whose power is both disquieting and sublime.