In 1889 Munch made a conscious decision about his art and wrote his own manifesto, he wanted only to paint living human beings, who breath and feel, suffer and love. What he meant was about to be shown in the Scream.
The idea emerges slowly, taking shape trough a number of sketches and paintings of an empty out world.
Munch began sketching a lonely figure walking down on a deserting road, in a vast landscape.
In another sketch, the isolated figure appears wearing a top hat and leaning over railings looking out to the water and a single ship. This is the scene described by Munch on his diary of 1892.
A lot of people assume that the Scream was done in a state of seizure, but the paint was made quite professionally, it took around three years to be developed.
The figure looking over the railing was itself reworked, eventually in a painting now known as Despair.
Munch has brought the melancholic figure right to the foreground, behind him blood red clouds mix up with the vicious yellow sky. The Despair was described by Munch himself as the first Scream. Further versions of Despair showed no progress, but finally in 1893 Munch produced a pastel drawing on a cardboard which recorded a far more shocking scene.
The moody male from the original drawing is gone, now there is a strange figure of uncertain sex staring open mouth directly at the viewer.
In the final composition the figure is even less human, and twists like a worm in the curves of the landscape. Munch had painted a spiritual experience.
It is like psyche kind of self portrait, it is not like he would look at himself at the mirror, but the way he felt - his mind and his body. He found an universal image for this terrible feeling.
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