Edvard Munch's "The Scream"

            The Scream was done in 1893 by the Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch. The death of his mother, a favorite sister, and the religious intensity of his strict father left him permanently scarred (The New York Times). His obsession with death, loneliness, jealousy, sexual anxiety, and torturous relationships with women, were all expressed in his artworks. When people criticized that if artists must change the appearance of men, they should idealize them rather than make them ugly, Munch responded back in his works that feelings of anguish is not beautiful, and that it would be dishonest to look only at the gratifying side of life. Expressionists at the time had strong feelings of human suffering, poverty, violence, and passion. Their thoughts were that only picturing beauty and harmony was brought out only from denial of the truth (Gombrich).

            All the lines in this artwork seem to lead to one focus point - the head of the screaming person. The face is distorted, and its staring eyes and hollow cheeks hint to a death’s head (Gombrich). An interesting fact is that there is mysterious pencil marks scribbled within a streak of the sky. No one knows if it was by Munch himself or someone visiting in one of his early exhibitions, but Munch never removed it. In Norwegian it says: “Could only have been painted by a madman” (Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’).

            The Scream relates to the theme because Munch is illustrating his true feelings. This screaming figure represented himself as he man standing on a similar bridge with a bloody red sky above him. A text accompanying this drawing state: “I walked with two friends. Then the sun sank. Suddenly the sky turned as red as blood … My friends walked on, and I was left alone, trembling with fear. I felt as if all nature were filled with one mighty unending shriek” (The Scream, 1895). All his emotions of loneliness, despair, desperation, and panic are threaded together in this artwork.

Edvard Munch The New York Times, Updated February 12, 2009. 2011 New York Times Company. Date accessed: April 26, 2011.   <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/edvard_munch/index.html>

Gombrich E. H., The Story of Art Sixteenth edition 1995. Phaidon Press Inc., New York. Page 564

Edvard Munch: The Scream (1984.1203.1) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art. < http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1984.1203.1#ixzz1KkKMvduN>