Friedrich Nietzsche (1906) | Edvard Munch | Painting Art Print | Wall Frame

“But grant me from time to time—if there are divine goddesses in the realm beyond good and evil—grant me the sight, but one glance of something perfect, wholly achieved, happy, mighty, triumphant, something still capable of arousing fear! Of a man who justifies man, of a complementary and redeeming lucky hit on the part of man for the sake of which one may still believe in man!” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Munch’s 1906 portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche offers a unique interpretation of the Symbolist aesthetic as well as Nietzsche’s ideas about art and physiology and the eternal return.

In Nietzsche, Munch discovered a shared spiritual kinship—both suffered from loneliness, a lack of recognition, and a fear of madness. Nietzsche’s own work on art and physiology coincided perfectly with Munch’s temperament and artistic interests; both regarded patho-physiology as a revelatory state, one to be feared as much as sought after. Art and physiology was much on the minds of nineteenth-century French and German thinkers, who often looked to rationalize man’s place in the world through the burgeoning field of what we today would call “metrics.”