10. Edvard Munch and Spanish Flu
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is perhaps best known for his 1893 painting he titled Der Schrei der Nature (The Scream of Nature), popularly referred to simply as The Scream. Four known versions of the painting exist, one of which bears the inscription “Can only have been painted by a madman”, placed there by Munch. The painter survived a grim childhood and spent most of his life dealing with emotional stress and the fear of mental illness which ran through his family. He drank heavily in his early life, reflected in his work, though in 1908 a mental and physical breakdown forced him to give up alcohol, at least in public.
Munch practiced what he called “soul painting“, transferring to canvas or other medium his feelings as a form of self-therapy. He strove to capture the suffering of people in his work, and his paintings included those of children ill with tuberculosis and the anguish of their parent/caretaker. In 1918, after a lifetime of poor health, Munch contracted Spanish flu. He chose to paint a self-portrait which he titled Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu. It depicted him sitting in isolation, alone in a room with an unmade bed in the background, a haggard, suffering expression on his face. It became symbolic of the illness. Munch, to his own surprise, survived the flu outbreaks and continued to work producing copies of his paintings until his death in 1944 in Nazi-occupied Norway.