KEY POINTS:
One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch's painting of a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace - her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin - created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago.
Some believed the Norwegian artist's anguished 1894 masterpiece, Love and Pain - since known as Vampire - to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite sister.
Some years later, Nazi Germany condemned it as morally "degenerate".
After remaining in the hands of a private collector for the past 70 years, the painting - one of Munch's most sought-after - will be sold at a Sotheby's auction in New York on November 3 for an estimated US$35 million ($51.3 million). The current auction record for a Munch work is US$31 million.
Vampire was part of Munch's seminal 20-work series, The Frieze of Life, which included The Scream. It is the most significant version of four Vampires he completed in 1893 and 1894, and was first exhibited in 1902 in Berlin, where his works caused shock and awe.
Vampire is the only work from the original series in private hands - although it was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until last year.
Munch always insisted the controversial painting was "just a woman kissing a man on the neck".
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