When Eddie Discovered Freddie

Leann Davis Alspaugh considers Edvard Munch’s affinity for Friedrich Nietzsche:

In Nietzsche, Munch discovered a shared spiritual kinship – both suffered from loneliness, a lack of recognition, and a fear of madness. Nietzsche’s own work on art and physiology coincided perfectly with Munch’s temperament and artistic interests; both regarded patho-physiology as a revelatory state, one to be feared as much as sought after. Art and physiology was much on the minds of nineteenth-century French and German thinkers, who often looked to rationalize man’s place in the world through the burgeoning field of what we today would call “metrics.” In 1847, Carl Ludwig introduced the kymograph, or “wave writer,” to track spatial position over time. Nietzsche himself personally owned a dynamometer, an instrument that purported to measure beauty and ugliness. In addition, developing photographic technology was used document the internal organs as well as facial expressions and the movement of the lips during phonation. With these graphical representations of bodily circumstances, thinkers like Nietzsche and Munch believed that elusive concepts like being, beauty, and aesthetics could be captured and made manifest, a sort of grand interdisciplinary ontological experiment.

(Image: Munch’s Friedrich Nietzsche, 1906, via Wikipedia)