The Scream: Great Art Explained (2)

figure, is this Peruvian mummy which Munch certainly saw on display at the Paris world's fair of 1889.

The figure itself is featureless, ungendered and de-individualized, and perhaps one of the reasons

why despite being a deeply personal painting, it has become a universal symbol of anxiety. It is a

blank page into which you can project yourself, and so it becomes about what we the viewer bring to it.

The figure is looking right at us, which pins us down "locking us" into the angst-ridden scene/

Barely visible on the painting, is a pencil inscription stating

"Could only have been painted by a madman". Infrared images show that it was Munch's

handwriting, and that it was written AFTER the painting was first exhibited in 1895.

Several important critics had questioned Munch's mental health, and it deeply hurt the artist who

had a morbid fear of insanity. We can look at the later added inscription as an angry

ironic comment from Munch. Then there is another inscription by Munch on an earlier lithograph.

"I felt a huge scream through nature" confirming that the figure is not screaming at all, but nature around him is.

What is interesting, is why Munch was in that location in the first place.

The setting of "The Scream" came about after the artist took a scenic walk,

as described in his diary. The actual place is called Ekberg which overlooks Oslo Fjord,

with a view towards the setting sun during the winter months. But as so often with Munch

his strength is how he departs from reality. He was not here for the scenery, but to visit

his younger sister Laura, who had recently been confined to an asylum near this spot.

Munch's father had just died, and after a lifetime of abandonment, through death and disease,

it is not too difficult to imagine the distress that he must have experienced as he left his beloved sister behind.

Her screams of terror must have haunted him as he walked away. In a world of extreme and rapid

change, combined with a life of desperate anxiety and alienation, Munch, who would have a nervous

breakdown in 1908, must have felt overwhelmed, as if his life was unravelling. All of us in some way

understand the desperate feeling Munch must have had, of wanting to block out all of this noise.

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