Munch, Madness and Creativity
The President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, and Queen Sonja of Norway inaugurated in Rome the exhibition “The Inner Scream”, by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. More than a hundred works by the painter were lent by the Munch Museum in Oslo, and the show is held in the splendid Palazzo Bonaparte.
“The Scream” by Edvard Munch
The President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, and Queen Sonja of Norway have recently inaugurated in Rome the exhibition “The Inner Scream”, by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). More than a hundred masterpieces by the painter have been exceptionally lent by the Munch Museum in Oslo. And it has been in the splendid Palazzo Bonaparte, which was the residence until her death of Napoleon’s mother, Maria Letizia Ramolino. The former Palazzo Rinuccini was decorated by Maria Letizia with paintings and sculptures, which were an artistic manifestation of the epic and glorious moments of her family. At the same time, at The Portrait Gallery in London, the first major exhibition of the portraits painted by Munch of relatives, friends and lovers, artists, patrons and collectors will open on 13 March.
“Sunset in Nordstrand”, work lent to the National Gallery of London by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
It is not common for painters to explain their works, since they are themselves the artist’s means of communication. One need only lean in to look at them. A painter communicates through his painting, since it is his language. For Munch it is impossible to explain a painting, since art arises from a human being’s need to communicate, or to open the heart, and he does so with the medium that best suits him.
In Munch’s case, a painter who wrote all his life, since his father induced him to keep a diary, he handled and experimented with all genres, from prose poems to lyrical texts, letters, etc., and dealt in them with the same themes that revolve around his pictorial work. They are like accounts that can be read in his paintings. These writings enrich the work of this singular artist and are an invaluable source of knowledge for the viewer, who approaches his work, vibrating in each of the deepest human feelings on which the body of his work is centered.
His paintings are charged with a strong intensity in the expression of sensations and feelings, and had great influence on German expressionism. These works, of a symbolic nature, have a content or an implicit meaning in them. They are evocative, nostalgic, they deal with worlds beyond reason and science, entering more mysterious and difficult-to-penetrate terrains, such as the world of the irrational, of feelings, of the subjective. Munch spiritualized art through themes as transcendental as love, jealousy, anguish, passion, eroticism, vitalism, death. For Munch memory is fundamental, since to paint the motif that moved you cannot be done coldly, since it would lose all the feeling, so it must be remembered. Therefore one must transmit that instant in order to also move the viewer: “I do not paint what I see but what I saw”.
Munch’s life was marked by the imprint of death. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five years old and his older sister would also die of the same illness, and he would gradually suffer the loss of his dearest loved ones. His father was a fervent Pietist. Munch defines him in his book The Frieze of Life (Nordica Libros) as hypernervous, religious to the point of bordering on madness, leaving him the seeds of it. Illness would be his faithful companion. He recounts that he received as an inheritance the two worst enemies of humanity, the inheritance of tuberculosis and mental illness: “Illness, madness and death were the black angels beside my cradle”.
The relationship of madness with creativity goes back a long way. Already Plato in his dialogue Phaedrus (Gredos), through Socrates, distinguishes two types of madness, one due to human illnesses and the other coming from the divinity. In this case creativity comes from the gods and he distinguishes four parts: prophetic inspiration, mystical, poetic and erotic madness, the most sublime. Therefore, madness would be the manifestation of the possession of the artist by a god. The god possesses him. It makes him produce exceptional works that are almost not human. This would be a way of understanding geniuses.
“The Girls on the Bridge” is exhibited at the Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome.
In contrast, in the book The Struggle with the Daemon (Acantilado), Stefan Zweig, passionate about psychology, dissects three poets such as Holderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche, also a philosopher. The three go mad, swept away by a whirlwind of passion, possessed by a non-human power, the power of the daemon. Understanding the demonic as that which drags toward the infinite, the universal, the abstract, it is the “leaven of the soul”. It is the creative spirit of every superior man, who succumbs to intoxication, to feverish creation. But Zweig makes a counterposition with Goethe, who fought all his life against the daemon, but was able to dominate it, order it within himself. Goethe knew how to master that demonic portion that all those who decide to raise themselves above themselves carry within. This would be the other face of creativity.
The psychiatrist and then philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) in Artistic Genius and Madness (Acantilado), also tells us about how madness influences genius, of how “schizophrenic processes can allow the creation of singular works of the spirit”.
And returning to Munch, his works also seem touched by a superior spirit. A passionate artist who knew how to transmit like no one the depths of the human being, with a skill and genius that make his works unique. His paintings, some almost mere sketches or as if half-finished, do not lose the emotional force with which the artist wanted to make the viewer a participant, inviting him to vibrate with them.
