The Scream by Edvard Munch Part I

Why people love this image so much ? It is weird, because it is a nightmare picture. It is a genuinely disturbing picture, and yet, people love it. 

It is like an icon of fear, it is a compulsive image, easy for anybody in the world to relate to the theme.  

The Scream by Edvard Munch is one of the world most recognizable images, more widely reproduced around the world than the Mona Lisa. This is not a painting anymore, it is an idea that entered our psych like a virus through the popular culture. 

                                                   

The Scream is an Expressionist painting, to understand how this work became an icon of the 21 century, we need to return to the life that Munch's masterpiece used to lead before The Scream began to take on a life of its own. 

There are 105 versions of The Scream, the original version is the one from 1893 hanging in the Oslo National Gallery. Hundred versions are prints and five are paintings. 

The idea behind the painting consumed Munch, he was obsessed by it, he endlessly reworked and copied it. People screaming had been included in pictures before, but he painted the bare fact of the scream and that was new. 

The idea of painting a scream is paradoxical idea, as a painting is silent by definition. The scream is a painting supposed to emit a sound. Who would paint a sound at that time ? 

But who or what was screaming ? It sounds like a silly question, surely is a tortured figure crying out in anguish. But that was not the notion of the obsessed Munch. 

Interpreting The Scream, we must ask where the scream is emanating from, is it coming from the figure itself ? Or is it coming from the oppressive environment, therefore the figure is paralyzed in front of the horror of the scene, is the enormity of the pain and the lack of ability to in fact express the intensity of the internal state. 

The sound is not coming from the little figure's mouth, it is the sound of the landscape, everything else is screaming, but the little figure has no voice. 

The idea of the landscape screaming comes from Munch's real life experience recorded in Munch's diary in 1892. 

" I was walking along a road with two friends, the sun set, I felt a tinge of melancholy, suddenly the sky became a bloody red, I stopped, leaned against the railing dead tired and I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like  blood in the sword of the blue-black fjord and the city, my friends walked on, I stood there trembling with fright and I felt a loud unending scream piercing nature. "

In recreating that feeling Munch places the figure  in the very spot where he experienced it, the landscape is not at all imaginary, it is a site in Oslo then known as Christiania, where that terrible feeling overtook him. The background landscape is loaded with meaning, for one thing this is a famous spot in Oslo, the traditional vantage point for artists to portrait the city. Munch included recognizable landmarks, the fjord and the old church. 

The figure seems to be standing on a bridge or a pier, but it is actually an old road outside of the city skirting a cliff. For Munch this place vibrated with painful memories. It was a scruffy spot on the wrong side of Oslo and the scene of many suicides. In 1983 one of Munch's close friends shot himself in the woods just below. There is also the Oslo hospital, then used as an asylum for women. At the very time Munch began to work on The Scream painting, his sister was hospitalized suffering from maniac depression. It was said that from the spot he could hear the sound of the insane women. There were also slaughter houses in the base of the cliff. 

So that day as he walked with his friends all the sorrow of his life had overwhelmed him. A beautiful sunset became something dizzying and frightful. 

Continues ...