Edvard Munch: What A Cigarette Means

At the end of the 19th century, the

cigarette

existed at the center of many different cultural forces. The one you're seeing here is from a painting by Edvard Mook, most famous for another canvas called a screen, this self-portrait with

cigarette

. Made two years later, though less jarring, it is just as concerned with the monk's personal psychology and the dark side of his identity as the Screamers, but for his critics in his hometown of Oslo, the dark, hazy feel of the portraits does not. Not only was he not suitable for art, but he was dangerous. the psychology of the city and the time as monks the self-portrait shows that he is in no way a normal man when an artist is abnormal a shadow is cast over all his art that is a quote from Johann Scharffen Berger Norwegian medical student who was repeating a line of conservative moral thought that feared the decline of society as a result of art such as that monk and his contemporaries were making.

This pessimistic attitude was popularized in a great book called Degeneration, written by this guy, Max Nordau, which attacked almost every kind of art that wasn't in force. according to his moral standards as poisonous and corrupting for Scharffen Berger Nordau the cigarette was a symptom of the degeneration of society; It was, along with alcohol, one of the ugly indulgences of civilization, but for MOOC and its circle of decadent artists the cigarette was something very different for them at the end of the century. The 19th century also represented a change, but it was an opportunity to break with the stale values ​​of the bourgeoisie, the prudish and uptight conservative values ​​of Nordau and his acolytes in the Europe of 1890.

The cigarette was not yet so popular just ten years before . James Albert von Sack invented a rolling machine that allowed 200 cigarettes per minute to be mass produced but they were still dwarfed by sales of cigars and pipes from the beginning, when beggars in Spain took discarded tobacco from the butts and with them The cigarette had always been associated with the lower classes in the Crimean War, soldiers rolled tobacco and old newspapers in the 1890s, when machine-made cigarettes were cheaper to produce and the working classes of Europe began to adopt the cigarette, while the middle class, especially the men, held on to their cigars This lithograph by Theophil Stein Hland perfectly captures the sentiment: notice how the Huazi bush man dressed in his appropriate dress and hat uses his cigar to light the cigarette for the man with a loose collar who is clearly of a lower social position.

It was in the lower classes that the monk and his bohemian contemporaries found an alternative to the suffocating middle-class value system that traded salons for late-night cafes, dinners for nightclubs, and cigars for cigarettes. Cigarettes became the essential underpinning of the bohemian lifestyle in this painting by mentor Christian Crowe. In this engraving by the monk himself you can see a 21-year-old monk Edouard lighting up with his friends and fellow painters in his studio, smoking snakes and filling the atmosphere of a café where bohemian intellectuals of both sexes drink and debate art and ideas, in other words. everything that Max Nordau despised as critic Patricia Berman points out.

The bohemians of the 1880s and 1890s embraced the deviance that people like Nordau assigned to them, they existed somewhere between the middle class and the anarchy of the streets and their aesthetic revolt was the birth of

what

we can see now was a great cigarette for the work of the monks, this meant moving away from the naturalism of his predecessors, the scientific recording of the natural world, even moving away from impressionism, which the monk saw as little more than formal exercises With light, your task would be to delve deeper into your own psyche. and record subjective experience that's how you get something as terrifying as The Scream that's how dark subjectivity warps the natural world as he later wrote he was walking down the road with two friends the sun was setting suddenly the sky turned red blood I stopped feeling exhausted and leaning on the fence there was blood and tongues of fire on the less blue-black and the city through which my friends were walking and I stayed there trembling with anxiety and I felt an infinite scream passing through nature, you read any newspaper or memory of someone who suffers from depression and will find similar moments of disturbing transformation, the truth is that mental illness was underscoring this entire transitional time in history when nations were faced with the rapid growth of anxiety, depression, mania and other mental illnesses.

Different groups reacted in different ways. really at the heart of Nordau's spheres of degeneration is

what

several bohemian artists of the time tried to explore in their work the tragic relationship between madness and creativity is undeniable some fled from that fact others refuse to look away in At this time there was a kind of general term that is no longer really used, neurasthenia, something that probably today is more like acute anxiety or mild mania, and here too the cigarette is significant because there was a belief that cigarette smoking was one of the causes. of madness a theory presented in a book by dr.

L Bremer called tobacco insanity and nervousness, another doctor, surgeon Theodore Bill Roth, believed that widespread cases of neurasthenia and neuroses were due to alcohol and cigarettes. Now, if we look again at the monks' self-portrait with a cigarette, we can see a nexus of all of these. The monk of social constructions is aware that his critics believe in his degeneration and in cigarettes as one of the causes of it. He uses it as a formal reason why the painting is hazy. He is enveloped in cigarette smoke, but he also uses this dissolution as a cigarette to signal.

The intersection between bohemian life, mental illness and art, the prevalence of mental illness, its connection to genius and Bush's failure was demoralizing when faced with these realities, codified the cigarette as a complex symbol to through which he affirmed his complex identity and created a place of recognition for those who suffer today because the problem of mental illness has only grown and its growth has increased - and we are not much more enlightened than we were then as to its causes , but I think the monks' work is a consolation because it demonstrates that our confusion about mental illness in medicine and science will always be accompanied by a searching and nuanced understanding of art of all kinds.

Hello everyone, thanks for watching, welcome to my new apartment in Los Angeles. I just moved here a couple of days ago with my girlfriend. and today is our one year anniversary, so if you're watching this you're definitely watching it because we're in the other room watching this together right now. I love you so much, happy anniversary, it has been the best year of my life. life and you are the best person I have ever met and I am definitely not going to drown in this final screen, so I will close it here by saying that I will see you next Wednesday.