Edvard Munch: What A Cigarette Means

[Music] at the end of the 19th century the cigarette existed at the center of a lot of different cultural forces the one you're looking at right here is from a painting by Edvard mook most famous for another canvas called the screen this self-portrait with cigarette made two years later though less jarring is just as concern with monks personal psychology and the dark underside of his identity as the Screamers but to his critics in his hometown of Oslo the portraits dark hazy unfinished feeling was not only unfit for art it was dangerous to the psychology of the city and the age as monks self-portrait demonstrates he is by no means a normal man when an artist is abnormal a shadow is thrown over all his art that's a quote by Johann Scharffen Berger Norwegian medical student who was echoing a line of conservative moral thinking that feared the decay of society resulting from art like that monk and his contemporaries were making this pessimistic attitude was popularized in a large book called degeneration by this guy Max Nordau who attacked pretty much every kind of art that wasn't up to his moral standards as poisonous and corrupting for Scharffen Berger Nordau the cigarette was symptomatic of society's degeneration it was along with alcohol one of civilizations ugly indulgences but for MOOC and his circle of decadent artists the cigarette was something much different for them the end of the 19th century also represented a change but it was a chance for a break from the stale bourgeoisie values the prudish and uptight conservative values of Nordau and his acolytes in 1890s Europe the cigarette still wasn't all that popular only ten years earlier James Albert von sack invented a rolling machine which made it possible to mass-produce 200 cigarettes a minute but they were still dwarfed by the sales of cigars and pipes since the beginning when beggars in Spain took the discarded tobacco from cigar butts and them the cigarette had always been associated with the lower classes in the Crimean War soldiers rolled tobacco and old newspapers by the 1890s when machine made cigarettes were cheaper to produce and by the working classes of Europe began adopting the cigarette while the middle class especially the men stuck to their cigars this lithograph by theophil Stein hland captures the feeling perfectly notice how the bush huazi man clad in his proper dress and hat uses his cigar to light the cigarette for the man with the loose collar who is clearly of a lower social standing it was in the lower classes that monk and his bohemian contemporaries found their alternative to the suffocating middle-class value system they traded in drawing rooms for late-night cafes dinner parties for nightclubs and cigars for cigarettes cigarettes became the essential prop up the bohemian lifestyle in this painting by mentor Christian Crowe you can see a 21 year old Edouard monk lighting up with his friends and fellow painters in his studio in this etching by monk himself smoke snakes and fills up the atmosphere of a cafe where bohemian intellectuals of both genders drink and debate art and ideas in other words everything Max Nordau despised as critic Patricia Berman notes Bohemians of the 1880s and 1890s embraced the deviancy 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 cigarette cool for monks work this meant moving away from the naturalism of his predecessors the scientific recording of the natural world even moving away from Impressionism which monk saw as little more than formal exercises with light his task would be to dig into his own psyche and record subjective experience that's how you get something as terrifying as The Scream this is how dark subjectivity warps the natural world as he wrote later I was walking along the road with two friends the Sun was setting suddenly the sky turned blood-red I paused feeling exhausted and leaned on the fence there was blood and tongues of fire above the blueblack fewer and the city my friends walked on and I stood there trembling with anxiety and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature you read any diary or memoir of a sufferer of depression and you'll find similar moments of disturbing transformation the truth is that mental illness was underscoring this whole transitional time in history as nations came to grips with the rapid growth of anxiety depression mania and other mental illnesses different groups reacted in different ways it's what's really at the heart of Nordau spheres of degeneration it's what a number of bohemian artists of the era were attempting to explore in their work the tragic relationship between madness and creativity is undeniable some ran from that fact others refuse to look away at this time there was a kind of catch-all term that's no longer really in use neurasthenia something that's probably more akin today to acute anxiety or mild mania and here too the cigarette is significant because there was a belief floating around that cigarette smoking was one of the causes of insanity a theory put forward in a book by dr. L Bremer called tobacco insanity and nervousness another doctor the surgeon Theodore Bill Roth believed that the widespread cases of neurasthenia and neuroses were quote due to alcohol and cigarettes now if you look again at monks self-portrait with cigarette you can see a nexus of all these social constructions monk is aware of his critics their belief in his degeneration and the cigarette as one of its causes he uses it as a formal reason why the painting is nebulous it's shrouded in cigarette smoke but he's also using this dissolution by way of cigarette to signal the intersection between bohemian life mental illness and art the prevalence of mental illness its connection with genius and the failure of Bush was demoralizing to come to grips with these realities he encoded the cigarette as a complex symbol through which he asserted his complex identity and created a site of recognition for those who suffer today because the problem mental illness has only grown and its growth has - and we're not that much more enlightened as to its causes than we were then but I think that monks work is a consolation because it proves that our confusion about mental illness in medicine and science will always be matched by a probing and nuanced understanding in art of all kinds hey everybody thanks for watching welcome to my new apartment in Los Angeles I just moved down here a couple days ago with my girlfriend and it's actually our one-year anniversary today so if you're watching this actually you're definitely watching this because we're in the other room watching this together right now I love you so much happy Anniversary it's been the best year of my life and you're the best person that I've ever known and I'm definitely not going to choke up on this end screen so I'll just close it here by saying I'll see you guys next Wednesday

Channel: Nerdwriter1

Views: 1,557,723

Keywords: edvard munch, munch, the scream, decadents, cigarette, self portrait, nerdwriter, art, painting

Id: Iu2L7oA9QRg

Length: 7min 34sec (454 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/MaxFischer9891]

I really like Nerdwriter, but his final statements sometimes are completely off. We're not that much enlightened about the causes for mental illness than 100 years ago? Maybe, in the same way cars aren't that much faster.