Edvard Munch and the Physiology of Symbolism

This book explores how and why the influential Norwegian artist Edvard Munch exploited late nineteenth-century physiology as a means to express the Symbolist soul. Munch’s series of paintings through the 1890s, known collectively as the Frieze of Life, looked to the physiologically functioning (and malfunctioning) living organism for both its visual and organized metaphors.