Confluences Between Theater and Visual Arts: Van Gogh and Edvard Munch or From Tragedy to Dramaturgy

Abstract

Between the performing arts and visual arts, for example between theater and painting or graphics, there are multiple interferences, which are not limited to scenography and costume. Cultural references and visual quotes are just two directions of development of modern and contemporary theater. Artists can support plays through images, but they can just as well inspire dramaturgical texts, either through life and professional activity, or through their creation, in itself. From books such as “The Lives of Painters, Sculptors and Architects” signed by Giorgio Vasari or Giovanni Pietro Bellori, or from various works and biographical studies dedicated to artists, we can find out a lot of information that explains or completes what we know or what we can deduce directly from their work, but most of the time those aspects are conjunctural, explaining only the context of the professional training, the orders or the game of chance that led to the realization of their works, as they came to be known. About artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Claude Monet, Tolouse Lautrec, or more recently about Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali one can say that they have put themselves in their work, in addition to unparalleled mastery and personality. Rarely, however, there is such a continuity between life and artistic work, as in the case of Van Gogh and Edvard Munch.