Tag: Edvard Munch
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Drawing parallels in pandemic art
Mariella Scerri Mellieha, Malta Victor Grech Pembroke, Malta Photo of the crowd at an undetermined 1918 Georgia Tech home football game. Photo by Thomas Carter, Public domain. Via Wikimedia. “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down…
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“The Sick Child” in Scandinavian art
Göran WettrellSweden Within Western figurative pictorial art there has long been an interest in showing sick children, their psychological attitudes, the effects on the family, and indeed the very reality of disease. One of the best known works on this subject is by Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) of the Dutch Golden Age of painting. Titled The…
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Mental illness in art
JMS PearceHull, England It is often said that creative art is linked to eccentricity, sometimes bordering on madness. Examples abound of great musicians, writers, and artists who at some time in their lives were deranged and often committed to institutions for mental illness. Some ended their lives in suicide. To what extent is art inspired…
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Edvard Munch: The child who never grew up
Michael YafiHouston, Texas The paintings of Edvard Munch are often used as an example of the association between creativity and mental illness. Can we, however, analyze them from the perspective of the feelings of a child? Traumatized by the death of his mother when he was only five years old1 as portrayed in The Dead…
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Edvard Munch: sickness and death
The Sick Child Death in the Sickroom These two paintings by the famous Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) reflect his lifelong melancholia and obsession with sickness and death. This has been attributed to his childhood experiences of his father’s drifting towards insanity, his mother’s death from tuberculosis, and the later death of two siblings from…
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Waiting
Fergus ShanahanIreland “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot1 Waiting. It’s an inescapable part of the human condition, perhaps, but it is a big part of the experience of illness. Being ill is being patient. Why otherwise use such a word? “Nobody, not even a lover, waits as intensely…