Painting and Writing Souls...August Stindberg err Strindberg by Edvard Munch @125

Year 2017 is 125th anniversary of August Strindberg's portrait by Edvard Munch

I first came to know about  August Stindberg because I fell in love with his quote, used as an epigram by the late  G A Kulkarni's (जी ए कुलकर्णी) for his book "Pingla Vel"  (पिंगळा वेळ), 1977:

"Shallow people demand variety – but I have been writing the same story throughout my life, every time trying to cut nearer the aching nerve".

dated 1892, Location: Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden 

Henrik Bering, WSJ, May 23 2012 writes:

“…While living in Paris in 1895, the Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg asked his friend Edvard Munch to create a portrait of him. Presented with the resulting lithograph, Strindberg was not entirely satisfied: Munch had misspelled his name "Stindberg"—stind is Swedish for "stout" and carries a suggestion of pompousness—and had placed a naked woman along the border, which somewhat detracted from the seriousness of the image. At their next encounter, without saying a word, Strindberg placed a revolver on the table. Munch got the message: In the new version, he corrected the spelling and removed the lady.

From then on, their friendship deteriorated rapidly. Strindberg was given to absinthe-fueled paranoia, at one point believing that assassins were lurking next-door, playing three grand pianos simultaneously. He accused Munch of trying to kill him with a stream of gas through the wall and fired off a postcard: "Your attempt to kill me by the Pettenkofer method failed. Enjoyed the evening." Munch chose to leave town in a hurry.

Despite the tumult of their friendship, the two men were vital intellectual foils, as Sue Prideaux, the author of the superb "Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream" (2005), shows in her rich "Strindberg: A Life." They were part of a generation of writers and artists who in the last decades of the 19th century rebelled—not against science as such, Ms. Prideaux writes, but against the notion that there was a materialist explanation for everything. Instead, they strove for "a great renaissance of the soul against the intellect," she writes: "Munch was considered 'to paint souls' and Strindberg to write about them. Together they slaked the great thirst for the acknowledgment of the metaphysical."…”