Edvard Munch Lightens Up

Alienation, God-death, the self as destabilized center of experience—this was the daemon’s message. The full harrowing gospel of modernity. It lived inside Munch, forcing its way along his fibers and blazing out of his doomy Scandinavian eye sockets. It gave him breakdowns and a massive thirst for alcohol. It made him strangely attractive to women. It hospitalized him, several times. He starved, he raved, he was vilified, and—being a great artist—he understood exactly what was happening. “If only one could be the body through which today’s thoughts and feelings flow,” he wrote to a friend. “To succumb as a person, yet survive as an individual entity, that is the ideal.”