Lifeblood: Edvard Munch

Abstract

"Over the course of Edvard Munch's lifetime, discoveries such as X-rays, germ theory, antibiotics and contraception transformed our understanding of the body forever. The exhibition Lifeblood - Edvard Munch places the Norwegian artist at the heart of this dramatic development, juxtaposing his works with skeletons, scalpels, sputum bottles and a range of other objects from the history of modern healthcare. In this book, these objects are given voice and presence through a diverse selection of texts written by art and medical historians, healthcare workers, activists, museum professionals, artists and writers. Each contribution takes works or objects from the exhibition as its point of departure, using them as an entry point into the complex terrain of care. The maps they draw are not the same - and that is precisely the point: medical experience is never uniform, but shaped by each individual's circumstances and identities" --Publisher's website

Contents

Nine sketches in watercolour writing / Fatema Abdoolcarim -- Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Lifeblood : Edvard Munch and the medicalisation of modern life / Allison Morehead -- Letter to a young doctor / Johanna Hedva -- No one here gets out alive / Olivia Laing -- Operative paintings : an x-ray perspective on Edvard Munch / Aurora Hoel -- 'With regard to Edvard's vaccinations' - a father's efforts to get his son vaccinated against smallpox / Espen Stueland -- Springing lancets and crippling theory / Cathrine Krøger -- Reflections and speculations on a skeleton left behind / Phil Loring -- The art and science of observation : the women and the skeleton / Alison W. Chang -- Close encounters in the health archive of an aunt, sister and brother : a 'sick women' letter exchange / Gemma Blackshaw and Alice Butler -- A place in the sun - a dark wicker chair in a new light / Ute Kuhlemann Falck -- I wanted to live / Olaug Nilssen -- Tuberculosis, stethescopes and auscultation / Jacalyn Duffin -- Sick children / Allison Morehead -- Death in the sickroom / Kaveh Rashidi -- Medical eroticism : the camera and the female patient / Natasha Ruiz-Gómez -- Self-portraits in Hell - Ode to all those I have visited in the psych ward... / Sara Stridsberg -- Inheritance and shame / Thorvald Steen -- The sorrow of the composite body : syphilitic infants in wax and paint / Mary Hunter -- Exhibiting a baby incubator / Allison Morehead -- The angel makers / Hege Duckert -- Reading Munch's Madonna through the lens of contraception / Nora Heidorn -- Edvard Munch's self-scrutinies, self-care and the 'Spanish' flu / Patricia G. Berman -- In the shadow of sickness / Signe Endresen -- 'The rolling black ball' : Edvard Munch's anxiety-filled relationship with his own health / Ingvard Wilhelmsen -- Emotionless food / Cathrine Knudsen -- Munch and Schreiner - anatomists of souls and bodies / Ageliki Lefkaditou -- Where the body ends and the world begins. On prosthesis and the human condition / Jan Grue -- A clinic in Copenhagen : care, gender, power / Allison Morehead -- Authors' biographies -- Exhibited works and artefacts