אמנות, מגיפה וחרדה: הדיוקן העצמי של אדוורד מונק עם השפעת הספרדית

This paper discusses the manner in which anxiety is portrayed in Edvard Munch’s Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu (1919), painted while the artist was ill during the influenza epidemic. The epidemic spread across the world in 1918, during World War I, and took the lives of millions of people. Munch survived the illness and created a number of self portraits about the subject. The paper analyzes the anxiety element of Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu and argues that it discusses Munch’s anxiety over his own personal death. While many of Munch’s works deal with death, illnesses and anxiety, they mostly portray the death of others or an abstracted, philosophical anxiety that is related to collective emotions. Munch’s self portrait as a sick man during a pandemic touches on the deep understanding that the death of the self is certain, and on the anxiety that this understanding ensues. For this aim, two earlier Munch paintings would be analyzed – Death in the Sickroom (1893) and Anxiety (1894) – in order to display how Munch adopted pictorial symbols of anxiety from his early works to portray the anxiety about his own death in the 1919 self portrait. The change in the location of anxiety should be understood as a response to the growing anxiety in the non combatant population during the epidemic years.