My Dyslexia
I hate presentation
I hate essays.
I hate PDP.
Basically I hate writing and orgainsing.
I can't even think in an orgainsd manner, I am messy and disorganised.
Sometimes when I try to thik of words I can't and I randomly say another word. For example if I was trying to think of a word but was looking at a chair, I would say Chair instead of the word I want to think of....
I had to write a 3000 essay, which was painful. I wrote it on Edvard Munch and his link between his art and the creations of his own transitional objects.
I chose this subject as it was suggested to me that I was creating my own transitional objects in my work....
I also had to do a presentation on this essay which was crap. (I did manage to scrape 65% which is a 2:1 though).
If you can be bothered here is my essay....
A Discussion On Edvard Munch and his creation of Transitional Objects.
“My afflictions belong to me and my art-‑they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship.”
In this essay I will discuss and research Edvard Munch’s life and his art, how his life events and tragedies made his art his own ‘transitional objects’.
I will discuss the definition of transitional objects, the creation of them in relation to Edvard Munch’s art and try to research and I shall find my own opinion on weather holding on to his past, in the form of his art, helped him or kept him trapped in the past.
Munch is quoted to have said ‘My afflictions belong to me and my art-‑they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship.”
I will look at his relationship with his mother and sister, their death’s, how these affected him and how relevant the fact that he painted his piece 'The Sick Child, 1885’, six times made it a ‘transitional object’, along with his constant flow of paintings of his mother.
I shall suggest that through his art he could visually recreate the dead members of his family, thereby denying his loss and the painful feelings associated with his tragic past. I shall suggest that this was not necessarily a good thing as in later life he was hospitalised due to anxiety and depression.
He was also able to express feelings toward his paintings, to love them and scold them. This is similar to how a child turns a teddy bear into a transitional object, scolding them and loving them in this way.
I shall reference the study ‘Edvard Munch A Study of Loss, Grief and Creativity’
by Lawrence Warick, M.D, Ph.D. & Elaine Warick, B.A.’, and argue with some of his points.
I shall look at Munch's longing for reunion with his sister and how his inability to give her up is shown obviously in his repeated paintings of her (and symbolic representations of her) in an attempt to recreate his lost loved ones. This action is best described by M. Robbins: "The creative process is set in motion when painful affects related to object loss and object hunger threaten to become conscious... In this way the artist creates his own world of objects which he may then possess and maintain, thus avoiding for the time, the pain of loss.”
At the end of the 19th century, around the same time Freud was investigating the new subject of madness (neurosis) and the effect childhood events have on the causes neurosis, a Norwegian artist, the not yet well known Edvard Munch (1863‑1944), began to express himself and his difficulties he had through in his world through his art, unwittingly becoming the founder an art style now known as Expressionism. Then it was simply an expression of his feelings.
Edvard Munch was born in 1863, in Norway. He was raised in Christiania (known as Oslo today), and, apart from the twenty years from 1889 to 1909 he spent studying and exhibiting his work in France and Germany, he lived there until 1944 when he died.
He worked as a painter from the 1880s right up until his death. The majority of his work and arguably the most recognised, was produced before the early 1920s.
During his lifetime of painting, printing and sculpting, Munch made one of the most important and lasting contributions to the development of Modernism in the twentieth century.
Munch was related to famous painters and artists in their own right, Jacob Munch (painter), and Peter Munch (historian).
Edvard Munch was an expressionist painter. In the late 20th century, he played a huge role in expressionism in Germany, and the art form that later followed. This is mostly due to the huge mental anguish that was clear to see in many of the paintings and creations that he produced.
The early death of Edvard Munch’s mother was the most, if not the most painful event in Edvard Munch's life, she sadly died of tuberculosis when he was only five years old. This trauma was made enormously worse when his older sister Sophie, who had taken over the maternal role and who Munch had recreated the feelings of motherly love for, also died of tuberculosis when Munch eight years later when he was thirteen. This was all to mould Munch’s personality and sculpt the person he became.
In addition to the two major losses during Munch's critical stages of childhood development, his father Christian Munch became unreliable and was not supportive or caring to the young boy, who needed the support, when he suffered a huge depression accompanied with psychotic symptoms that manifested themselves with a religious obsession, after his wife's death. His fathers problems played a big role in the way he was raised. He raised them to have a terrifying and huge fear of hell. Munch once said “I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.” (http://www.edvardmunch.org/edvard-munch-quotes.jsp)
His father also had other huge deep seated issues, which, I believe are part of the reason why the work of Edvard Munch took a deeper tone, and why the artist was known to have so many repressed emotions as he grew up.
It is not surprising that with Munch's background of loss, sickness and neglect, that his art would later be described by many critics as "melancholy."
Munch started producing self‑portraits in his late teens and continued until old-age. One thing that is noted is his self‑portraits all show him looking sad or depressed. In many, his mouth is turned downward, his shoulders droop and in many he painted deep wrinkles in his forehead, that Darwin described as "grief muscles.”
Munch's early art work (1800‑85) began as the style of Naturalism both because it was often a critical look and opinion on society, and the way he painted it in a realistic manner.
When he was 22 years old Munch painted the best known piece, The Sick Child.
The painting is of a scene that happened in his childhood, the event of the death of his sister Johanne Sophie (1862 - 1877) from tuberculosis at the age of 15.Munch painted this picture six times during the his life and wrote that he experienced grief in its fullest sense in the re-painting of this memory.
Munch returned to this deeply traumatic event again and again in his art, he painted six oil paintings and made many other images in different media, over a 40 year timescale. In every image, Munch’s sister Sophie is always shown on her deathbed with a dark-haired, grieving lady thought to be her aunt Karen, the studies often show her head cropped. In all the paintings Sophie is lying in her bed, shown to be suffering from pain, sat up with a large white pillow behind her head, propping her up. She is shown looking towards an dark curtain that I believe to be painted as to symbolise death. Sophie is shown with a haunted look in her eyes, holding the hand of the grief stricken older lady, who appears to want to comfort her but appears to be unable to look the younger girl in the eye, as if she is trying to stop Sophie seeing the fear in her eyes.
Munch nearly died from tuberculosis as a child, himself. The Sick Child became for him, in my opinion, a way for him to express and record his feelings of guilt and despair in his feelings that he had survived and his sister hadn’t. It must have helped him to as he became obsessive with the image, almost relying on it for his sanity.
I believe that through his art Munch could mentally and almost physically recreate his mother and sister, this not only helped him express his feelings, but through doing this he could almost deny his feelings of loss and the pain he had associated with his sad and neglectful past. He could project emotions onto his art, that he found unacceptable to have in himself. A child uses a toy (a transitional object) in the same way. He was also able to allow himself to have feelings of love toward his paintings and could use them to take his anger out on.
Munch was able to reduce the depression and anxiety that plagued him, as long as he was around his treasured.
This is the link I found that suggests Edvard Munch created his own transitional objects in his artwork.
When a child create a transitional object it may be the first true act of creativity, as the child is using its imagination to create an object that becomes ‘real’ out of nothing.
Winnicott's original definition of a transitional object was that “it is inanimate, is endowed by the infant with special properties and is of value in the developmental task of acknowledging that Mother (or her breast) is alive, is not a physical part of the baby, nor yet its external possession.” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7440076)
A child can take the object anywhere and receive a quick dose of comfort whenever it feels anxious, that is why it has been given the name ‘comfort’ or ‘security’ object, because that is the feeling it gives the holder.
With a child, these transitional objects help the child deal with a transition, such as the transition from being awake to going to sleep, or the transition from being with mother to being with a child-minder. Security, or comfort, objects are usually very soft and small of ‘home’. They can be an item such as a blanket, piece of torn muslin,or a stuffed teddy bear. Transitional objects that children create are usually something that reminds them of their mother. It has a familiar texture and smell that the children will use to become independent, they normally carry these with them wherever they go even though the can become tattered and grubby, but if they were to be washed, the children would only get them dirty again. It is the smell and the texture of the object, not the appearance that is important to the child. Not all children have comfort blankets of transitional objects but many do.
The use of transition objects continues through our lives as we give objects the meaning and the memories that are associated with other other people or places that we associate with nice feelings.
For Munch his paintings helped him hold on to his late mother and sister and he relied heavily on them for comfort and support in his life and career as an artist. The importance of these paintings is not to be underestimated.
In the early 1890's, Munch developed his own expressionistic, unique style and produced a large group mass of paintings that express his deep childhood feelings and memories. The themes of this group of work, were love, loss of love, despair, loneliness, anxiety and jealousy, attachment, engulfment, separation and finally death. Later on Munch grouped these pictures together and they were named ‘The Frieze of Life’. One of the most famous pictures in this in this group is ‘The Scream’. Munch painted many versions between 1893 and 1910. Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature) is the title Munch gave to these paintings.
The Scream painting shows a figure on a bridge, disintegrating, with an fading sunset and sea, these are painted with two roughly drawn figures walking into the background. Although many people have interpreted this picture, I personally think it represents loss in many ways, of many things, the loss of the self with the figure that dissolves, loss of the daytime shown in the sunset and the loss of his parents who may be the two figures disappearing into the distance. Like so much of his work Munch reproduced this picture many times, in many different styles and media.
I believe Munch used this group of paintings and his reproduction of the same object, as a way of getting his anxieties and fears out of his mind, but at the same time he was hugely narcissistic and seemed to dwell on his loss massively, so although he is clinging on to them by recreating them like a transitional object, he has an out let for his anxiety.
Munch’s life was almost ruined with his anxieties and troubles, while his art bloomed in the early 1900s, his physical and emotional health and his stability deteriorated. He was admitted to hospital for respiratory problems, "nerves," and for his alcoholism. He suffered from sever depression and many intense phobias such as agoraphobia, and a fear of germs. He wad troubled by insomnia and had many somatic symptoms, He was suspicious of people, and when he drank alcohol, his paranoia increased to the point where he got into fights in bars and pubs. He also experienced hallucinations during his alcohol fuelled binges.
After an alcoholic binge that lasted three days, in the autumn of 1908, Munch admitted himself to Dr Daniel Jacobson's psychiatric clinic in Germany Copenhagen for his problems, mainly depression and anxiety.
Munch's time in hospital seemed to rid him of the problems with alcohol and he returned to Norway, at age forty five, seemingly much more stable.
Although huge changes in his work had already taken place, even as early as1902, after the psychiatric treatment he received between 1908‑09, the content of his art seemed to be more positive and showed aspects of the external world that were more happy and positive, and less with his troubled internal demons. However Munch continued to rework his old themes, every now and then. When physician, Dr. Schreiner, gave him the advice to seek help for his emotional problems, he said “he felt his creativity might be destroyed if he were treated.”
These are, in my opinion, his narcissistic tendencies stopping him from his enjoyment of being able to allow himself excuse his behaviour he somewhat enjoyed.
During the last thirty five years of his life, Munch lived in Norway, becoming a social recluse, avoiding contact with people and he devoted himself to his work. He gave up alcohol, cigarettes and women. He continued to live with anxiety, depression and psycho-somatic symptoms, but these did not stop his creativity or stop him producing more masterpieces.
Stenersen says later in life Edvard Munch developed a very intense relationship and bond with his paintings and regularly talked about them as if they were living people. This is a very clear sign that he used them as transitional objects.
When he was offered large amounts of money for a painting, he is quoted to have said, "I must have some of my friends on the walls." (Edvard Munch
A Study of Loss, Grief and Creativity)
Although Munch always was attached to his paintings, after his mental illness in 1908, they seemed to totally replace his relationships with all people.
Munch’s art reveals his lifelong troubles and struggle to deal with pathologic grief.
I have no doubt that Edvard Munch's creativity saved him from complete psychological meltdown and calmed his painful journey through the troubles of his life. As an artist I have found it interesting to observe and research the link between early childhood loss, pathologic grief and creativity, and the use of perhaps many artists of their work as ways of helping them deal with troubles, and the formation of their own transitional objects.
In his death in 1944, it was learned that Munch had left his remaining work to the city of Oslo in Norway. There were over1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings, and 18,000 prints, this collection was displayed in museum created for just this work,in 1963, where it is a testament to Munch's lasting history.
To conclude, Edvard Munch, his life and mental problems, have shown how transitional objects are used by adults as well as children for more than one reason. Not just comfort and (in Munch's case) a connection between the alive and the dead, but as an object to put our problems onto to perhaps un burden ourselves. They are created to calm.
REFERENCES
“I must have some of my friends on the walls”
“My afflictions belong to me and my art-‑they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship.”
From: Edvard Munch. A Study of Loss, Grief and Creativity by Lawrence Warick, M.D, Ph.D. & Elaine Warick, B.A.
“I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.”
Found on edvardmunch.com http://www.edvardmunch.org/edvard-munch-quotes.jsp
