Alt CME: Live Blogging from Chicago, Edvard Munch

Mrs. Bremner and I played hooky from the American Psychosomatic Society (APS) Meeting on Friday to visit the Chicago Institute of Art, where they had an exhibition on the artist Edvard Munch, which was a real scream. That is one of the perks of our travel intensive lifestyle, is getting to visit art galleries in other cities. Most of us have only seen the painting “The Scream”, which was recently stolen (and then returned) from a museum in Oslo, Norway (sorry! won’t do it again). However he has a number of wonderful paintings. Here is his self portrait.

Didn't anyone tell you that smoking is bad for you, Edvard?

 And I was particularly interested to learn that, like me, his mother died when he was five years old, and also like me, he had occasional bouts of anxiety.

Not a good feeling

His paintings really strike a chord, though, described by a contemporary critic as:

A breath of fresh air from unseen worlds.

Or something like that. He focused on themes like love and death that speak to us all, like this one:

Grief, the eternal condition.

Many of us spend our entire lives grieving, if we are lucky enough to even get to the starting line. Grief, or what is worse not even getting to the point where you can start to grieve, is the cause of much mental health problems today.

In Sicily, where Mrs. Bremner comes from, the women traditionally wore black for a year when someone died. So when you went to the villages in the interior, all of the women were wearing black, cuz someone had always died.

If they were outside, that is (most of the time all day indoors making pasta).

I think the US has something to learn from them. I love cemeteries.

My mom's headstone

Yes, I cry when I see these pictures. But at least I can cry. That is more than I could have said for most of my life.

And that is your mental health Alt CME for the day, boys and girls.

It is interesting how Munch has been interpreted. Called a “neurasthenic” in his day, a psychiatric diagnosis (no longer used) which describes anxiety, depression, psychosomatic concerns, he actually promoted this as a way to market himself as an “alternative artist”, although it is clear he suffered mental torments. A friend and fellow Bohemian Berline cafe sitter, a Polish man named Przybyszewski wrote critiques of his art highlighting the misogynist nature of Munch. He is in this painting in the foreground.

Przybyszewski

He even changed titles of his painting showing a woman kissing a man’s neck to “Vampire” from “Love and Pain”. Munch was a good one on love though. Check this one out:

Madonna

Classic femme fatale. Just like Mrs. Bremner!

I was interested to learn that Munch, like many artists, did not care about the titles of his paintings, and so they were made by dealers or people like his Polish friend. That guy later killed his wife and abandoned his children. Not a very good one to learn about the meaning of Munch’s paintings. I think Munch was expressing the unconscious mind, and the “meaning” of his paintings didn’t really matter.

Kinda like the content of the Drug News and Health Safety Blog.

Oops! This is supposed to be science. I take that back.