Art and Suffering

This was the mythology that my parents generation subscribed to. To heal would result in no longer being an artist. I completely disagree.

From Writer's Almanac today:

It's the birthday of painter and printmaker Edvard Munch, born in Löten, Norway (1863). A sickly child, his mother and favorite sister both died of tuberculosis when Munch was a boy, and he was still a young man when his father and brother died as well. Another sister went mad. "I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies — the heritage of consumption and insanity — illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle," he wrote in his journal.

He painted a 22-painting cycle that he called Frieze of Life — A Poem About Life, Love, and Death. He referred to his paintings as his children, and whenever he sold one of them, he always painted a replacement, to keep the cycle complete. Munch intended the Frieze paintings to be seen as universal, rather than personal, portraits of humankind, and he often tried to convey inner psychological states through distortions of color and form. His most famous painting, The Scream (1893), influenced the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century.

Munch had a nervous breakdown in 1908, ending up in a sanitarium. He gave up drinking and managed to gain some tranquility in the second half of his life, but later paintings never recaptured the passion of his earlier, tormented period. "My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness," he once wrote. "Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. ... My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art."