Art and Madness

Today is the birthday of painter Edvard Munch, born in Løten, Norway (1863). A sickly child himself, he lost both parents and two of his siblings to tuberculosis. 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.

Munch tried to convey emotional turmoil through the use of color and distorted shapes. 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 his art lacked the passion of his earlier, tormented period. "Without anxiety and illness," he wrote, "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."