Woman with Red Hair and Green Eyes (The Sin) (1901): Art, History and Details

Woman with Red Hair and Green Eyes (The Sin) (1901) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863–1944).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The fatal women and embracing couples in Picasso’s art of the early 1900s exhibit striking affinities with the same themes in the prints of Norwegian symbolist Edvard Munch. Munch’s paintings and prints were widely circulated in Paris, shown at exhibitions, and available through dealers and fellow artists. Long hair as a key symbol of the fatal woman’s sexual allure is a recurrent theme in Munch’s art, as evident in this lithograph of 1900.

Object facts

• Title: Woman with Red Hair and Green Eyes (The Sin)
• Date: 1901
• Creator attribution: Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863–1944)
• Culture: Norway
• Type: Print
• Technique: color lithograph
• Dimensions: Sheet: 77.7 x 49.2 cm (30 9/16 x 19 3/8 in.); Image: 69.8 x 40.2 cm (27 1/2 x 15 13/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1983.185

A detail from the museum

Edvard Munch often used red hair in his paintings, drawings, and prints as a symbol of sexuality.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “Year in Review for 1983.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 71, no. 2 (February 1984): 38–79.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.