Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1895-1897 (?), Oil on canvas
“Celebrities, they’re just like us!”
This is the real title of a section in a popular gossip rag that prints photos of celebrities going about their lives–grocery shopping, picking up their dog from the groomer, going to the dentist. The public is consumed with these mundane comings and goings; obsessed with the celebrity that admits they too suffer from seasonal depression or self-doubt, fear and uncertainty. Cavities and broken bones, addiction and psychoses, seeming imperfections, help to break the spell cast by the fact of their celebrity, help to restore the ordinariness to them.
Nearly as old as celebrity itself is the tortured artist trope. Passed around, collected, and hoarded like currency are stories of an artist’s self-destruction–Van Gogh’s ear, Mark Rothko’s suicide, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s overdose. Fitting snugly within their ranks is Edvard Munch, the man responsible for the best-known depiction of a psychotic episode, The Scream. Munch was haunted by ghosts. Possibly he was schizophrenic, but he was perpetually spooked by the shadows in corners, by whispers real and perceived, by memories. Munch coped with his near-constant anguish by laying it all out in brush strokes and colors reminiscent of the hallucinations from which he often suffered. The resultant imagery feels profound, rife with emotion, fever dream-like, saturated, and phantasmagoric. His figures peer from below hooded lids, eclipsed by their secrets, to which we are only superficially privy. They look just beyond us, just behind us, just through us, we’ll never be party to the reveries in which they’re engaged. We’re onlookers, invited only to gaze at their beauty and not into their private worlds. His 1903 lithograph, Die Brosche, Eva Mudocci, in all her gorgeous, fiery glory is my pick of the week.
Edvard Munch, Die Brosche, Eva Mudocci, 1903 | Image courtesy of bG Gallery