A pleasurable read I finished in an afternoon about a painter whose melancholic, surreal, dynamic paintings I have always found fascinating. Now I know a large part of that mood was due to how constant death was for him with mother dying young then his sister, then his father, & his contraction of several serious illnesses. It doesn't go deeply into any theories or try to psycho-analyse the man or his paintings. It's a great primer for someone like me who isn't familiar with the world of art, and just really likes appreciating it.

I loved the pictured paintings & the short descriptions provided & in fact I wish I could see/read more of his diary entries because he actually writes so poetically too. His own descriptions of his paintings were the best..

‎“I was out walking with two Friends –the sun began to set- suddenly the sky turned blood-‎red –I paused, feeling exhausted, and there I still stood, trembling with fear –and I sensed an ‎endless scream passing through Nature.” – Edvard Munch on The Scream

“All the tenderness in the world is in your face –Moonlight passes across it- Your lips crimson ‎as the fruit that is to come part as if in pain. The smile of a corpse. Your face is full of the ‎beauty and the pain in the world, because Death and Life are joining hands and the chain that ‎links the thousands of generations of the dead with the thousands of generations yet to be ‎born is connected.” – Edvard Munch on Madonna

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Munch moved away from Naturalism, the scientific recording of the natural world, even moving away from Impressionism. He digged his own psyche and record subjective experience, and that is how you get something as terrifying as ‘The Scream’ This is how dark subjectivity warps the natural world.

He wrote this later about ‘The Scream.’

"I was walking along the road with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned bloody red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood an tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

If you read letters, diary, or memoir of a sufferer of depression (Vincent Van Gogh, Franz Kafka) you’ll find similar moments of disturbing transformation. The tragic relationship between madness & creativity is undeniable. Some ran from that fact, others refused to look away. ( )

Sempre pensei nesse livro como complementado pelo maravilhoso docudrama de Peter Watkins.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074462/ ( )

Munch is bij mij vooral bekend vanwege dat ene schilderij "De schreeuw", dat zo treffend de angst voor het leven lijkt te verbeelden. Uit dit boekje komt naar voren dat hij ook een groot portretschilder was. ( )