The Scream: Great Art Explained (1)

this video is sponsored by Bright Cellars. Offer below, details at the end

Under a blood-red sky a terrifying figure with a skull-like face is staring out at us.

And it appears to be screaming in anguish. Edvard Munch's "The Scream", one of the most famous

images in the history of art has become for us, a universal symbol of angst and anxiety.

Europe was at the birth of the modern era when he painted Ths Scream

and the image reflects the intense anxieties that troubled the world at this time. Anxieties

which Edvard Munch himself found overwhelming. The figure is in fact, not screaming at all.

Rather it is holding its hands over its ears to block out the scream.

Between 1863 when Munch was born and the years before the first world war

European cities were going through truly exceptional changes. Industrialisation and economic

shifts brought fear, obsessions, diseases, political unrest and radicalism. Questions were being raised

about society and the changing role of man within it. About our psyche, our social responsibilities,

and most radical of all - about the existence of God. The rich were getting richer, but in Christiania

(now Oslo) living and working conditions were as bad as ever, a major cause of death and disease.

Munch himself would endure a life ravaged by madness, sickness and death. His mother

and his sister both died of Tuberculosis. His father and grandfather suffered from depression,

and another sister Laura from Schizophrenia. His only brother would later die of pneumonia.

Always a sickly child himself, Munch turned to drawing to keep himself occupied in his sick bed.

When he later decided to become an artist his father, a fundamental Christian, gave him no support

as he considered the profession "unholy". He told his son that the death of his mother and sister

was "divine punishment" for their sins and his traumatic childhood never left him as an adult.

This would have a lasting effect on Munch's work.

His early paintings were grounded in realism, but in 1884 he joined Christiania's bohemian circle,

which was led by the anarchist writer Hans Jæger. Jæger encouraged Munch to reject religion, break

with bourgeois principles and morals, and move away from realism to paint his own emotional

and psychological state. A powerful painting dating from this period drew on the death of

his sister and mother. It is hard now to imagine the outrage it caused but the bourgeois Norwegians

despised the rough brushstrokes, scratched surface and the deep melancholy of the piece.

The painting and the ensuing scandal would set the tone for his future work.

Munch was looking outside of provincial Christiania, and on a short trip to Paris

in 1885, he had the chance to see the revolutionary work of the Impressionists.

Their use of colour and form was a revelation for the young artist. Munch was always loathe

to admit that he was influenced by any artists, but here we can compare Monet's solitary figure

lost in thought, with Munch's own later composition whereas Monet's paintings are a study of light on

the exterior, Munch is exploring the interior life, and already shows a preoccupation with loneliness

and angst. The years in Paris were his experimental years when Munch was finding his style, and in 1889

he returned to Paris to study for three years. The Eiffel tower had just been completed, the

post-impressionists were becoming established, and Vincent van Gogh had just painted "The Starry Night".

Van Gogh's expressive and emotional brushwork deeply influenced Munch as did his use of colour.

Munch understood that van Gogh's posthumous fame was thanks to a combination of his paintings

and his tragic personal story, and later Munch was not averse to marketing himself as a mad genius,

which he understood would play an important role in his art.

Mostly he was fascinated by Paul Gauguin and the symbolists, whose ideas he would expand on.

Gauguin's use of heavy outline simplified shapes and solid blocks of colour

would influence Munch's style. He would later adopt the bold graphic outlines of Gauguin,

Van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, whose posters were on the streets of Paris when Munch arrived.

The young artist was like a sponge, soaking up painting styles, ideas, and motifs from different

artists. Sometimes in a more obvious ways - and like most artists of this period he experimented with

"Pointillism". What really interested him about the post-impressionists was their rejection of realism

in favor of absolute truth through their own emotional experience and imagination.

The unique thing about Munch was how he would take these formal tools and ideas from French painting

and then combine them with a northern sensibility, more concerned with melancholy.

In 1892, he was invited to Berlin where these psychological insights would NOT be welcome.

Munch was invited to put on a solo show in Berlin, but the organisers had no first-hand experience

of his work. Norwegian paintings of fjords were very fashionable and they were expecting this.

The Germans thought his work was too raw, too brutal, and too unfinished. The show was so controversial

that it would be shut down after a week. Munch however, was delighted with the scandal, as his

notoriety ensured he became an overnight sensation. In Germany. In Berlin he was friends with the

Swedish writer August Strindberg and, as so often with Munch, it was literature he looked to for

inspiration to explain universal human experiences. We can see his work in this period as moving away

from painting one image and more towards a series of works, that can be viewed in literary terms.

The masterful series he produced in the 1890s. "The Frieze of Life" was intended to be seen as

a poem of life, love and death. And it would be his life's major work. The series started with six but

eventually grew to a total of 22 works - the scream would be just one of them - The Impressionists

had of course worked in series, but more as an observation on light and atmospheric conditions.

Whereas Munch was working this way to create a total work of art (or in german a "Gesamtkunstwerk")

Munch split the works into four themes and when we place them together as he would have, we can

see he was trying to tell a "story". Here we have "The seeds of love", "the passing of love", "anxiety'

and "death". Around this time Munch started to produce multiple versions of many of his paintings.

There was a practical reason behind it, his idea was to keep the "Frieze of Life" together and eventually

donate them as a whole to a museum in Oslo, when he died. So when he sold a painting he then produced

a copy to replace it, to avoid breaking up the group. The more popular the painting

the more copies there are in existence. On top of this, he had a pathological hatred of parting

with his paintings (which he called my children). It was as if he couldn't bear to part with his past.

On the 22nd of January 1892, Munch wrote in his diary "I was walking

down the road with two friends, when the sun set. Suddenly the sky turned as red as blood.

My friends walked on, I stood there quaking with angst and I felt as though a vast endless

scream passed through nature". What is debatable is whether those screams were real or psychological.

The idea of the figure in the landscape and man's relationship to nature, is something

that Munch draws on from the romantic tradition of the early 19th century.

But The Scream focuses on the inner psychology of man - in relation to nature. A painting he did just

a year before the scream is a rather similar image, but with a small crowd of ghostly figures staring

out at us. The painting conveys urban alienation, the feeling that you can be all alone in a crowd.

And Munch's figure in The Scream expresses similar ideas about anxiety and alienation. The disturbing

figures are a reoccurring theme for Munch and he used the same setting to produce other paintings.

This painting also has the same red and yellow sky, mountains and fjords in the background,

but instead of the skeletal figure staring out at us there is a self-portrait of Munch.

The composition itself is simple, we can divide the painting into the bridge, the fjords and the sky.

The main figure is curved and broadens out to blend into the background. The two figures

(his friends in the diary entry) are vertical unlike the main figure.

This with the sharp diagonals of the bridge, anchor us in the real world. The background

suggests the world is dissolving into chaos and pre-figures abstract painting.

The tiny figures are deep in conversation and despite the chaos they are oblivious.

Munch underlines their emotional distance from the protagonist by placing them at a physical distance,

walking away on an absolutely straight road. The painting may look as if it is done quickly,

but Munch would go through meticulous preparation. Here we see the development of the lone figure as

it goes from the far distance to the foreground. In his diary sketch, the violent red sky develops

and written to the side is his description of that walk with his friends. The self-portrait

will give way to the figure we know. Note in this sketch, one of the two background figures

is not yet walking away. If we take the two figures away completely the scene is not as claustrophobic,

and it changes the atmosphere. Every element in the painting is carefully planned - and even after all

this planning Munch made last-minute changes, as we see with this initial sketch on the reverse.

This 1893 painting is probably his first version of "The Scream". It is mixed media - oil tempera and pastel.

This one, also dated 1893, is in pastel.

Auctioneer: "107 billion dollars - sold!"

The only one in private hands. And this is a later copy from 1910 also tempers. All the paintings are

done on unprimed cardboard. Munch often worked with cheap material, first because he couldn't afford

canvas, and later because the texture suited his aesthetic. They were often glued onto wooden boards

as we can see here. A treatment no longer used. He would use diluted paint, a technique he picked

up from Toulouse-Lautrec, and he deliberately left paintings unfinished as a sort of anti-art statement

He wanted the cardboard to show through the various diluted layers of pastels, to allow

the process to show. At times he has violently stabbed on paint with the back of his brush.

He never varnished his work as he liked the matte finish, insisting varnish "killed a painting dead".

Then he had something which he called "the horse cure". This was basically leaving his paintings

outside in the garden, in all weathers to "fend for themselves". He thought his paintings should have an

organic life and he wanted them to look aged. Here we can see one of the many stains on the painting,

where Munch - in this case - spilled some wax on it. All of these add up to a nightmare for conservators.

TV NEWS: "Two or three armed, masked men burst into the Munch Museum in Oslo, in broad daylight and took

the paintings, as visitors watched". One of the ironies about the scream is that

when it was recovered after being stolen it was quickly jumped upon by a small army of conservators.

Munch however would have preferred they left it damaged - as part of its ongoing life.

I think it is interesting, to look at possible inspiration. Scientists have linked the sky's unnatural colours

to volcanic dust from the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, which generated incredible sunsets in Europe

for months after. They have also linked it to a phenomenon known as "Nacreous cloud formations",

common in Norway during winter, which is when Munch painted The Scream. A possible inspiration for the