Edvard Munch and the Physiology of SymbolismShelley Wood Cordulack
About the Author : Her publications are wide-ranging, including articles on the German Expressionist artist E.L. Kirchner, the post-World War II artist Jean Dubuffet, and the contemporary artist Anselm Keifer. Her main scholarly interest, however, has been the relationship between art and science/technology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has published articles on Art Nouveau and the physics of flight and Paul Klee and navigation, and is currently working on three more projects in that area. Shelley Cordulack has been recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Norwegian Marshall Fund, the University of Illinois, Millikin University, and the Bakken Library. She is also active in both professional organizations and community affairs.
Shelley Wood Cordulack received her doctorate in the History of Art from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign in 1996, with an area of specialization in art from 1880 to the present. Since 1995 she has been a full-time member of the faculty at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, where she holds the rank of Associate Professor of Art History, and was named Distinguished Faculty Lecturer of the year 2000.
The influential Norwegian artist Edvard Munch produced his most important body of works, in which he explored all major themes and developed his principal images, during the decade of the 1890s. In 1918 he finally named this group of works the Frieze of Life, emphasizing his perceptions of it as a living, harmonious whole. This book put forward a new interpretation of Munch’s major works, placing his use of Symbolism within the late nineteenth-century rage for science in general and physiology in particular. Munch’s subject matter may have dealt with feelings about the soul, love, life, death, and creativity; but it is to the contemporary physiological framework that we must look in order to deepen and broaden our understanding of his use of these themes. Like the physiologists who realized that the living being should be looked upon as a harmonious whole, Munch saw his works as a Frieze of Life. This is further born out in the formal aspect of Munch’s work with its flowing, pulsating rhythms of lines and shapes held together and in harmony. The landscapes that form the unifying backdrop to these pictures resemble the human “internal environment” and human connective tissue. This book explores how and why Munch exploited such aspects of late nineteenth-century physiology. ISBN 0-8386-3891-0
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