I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
Edvard Munch, who never married, called his paintings his children and hated to be separated from them. Living alone on his estate outside Oslo for the last 27 years of his life, increasingly revered and increasingly isolated, he surrounded himself with work that dated to the start of his long career. Upon his death in 1944, at the age of 80, the authorities discovered—behind locked doors on the second floor of his house—a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and 15,391 prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks, copperplates and photographs. Yet in a final irony of his difficult life, Munch is famous today as the creator of a single image, which has obscured his overall achievement as a pioneering and influential painter and printmaker.
Munch's The Scream is an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time. As Leonardo da Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and self-control, Munch defined how we see our own age—wracked with anxiety and uncertainty. His painting of a sexless, twisted, fetal-faced creature, with mouth and eyes open wide in a shriek of horror, re-created a vision that had seized him as he walked one evening in his youth with two friends at sunset.
Edvard Munch, has described himself in a book written in 1900 as nearly going insane, like his sister Laura who was committed to a mental institution during this time period as well. Personally he discussed being pushed to his limits, and going through a very dark moment in his life.
The scene of The Scream was based on a real, actual place located on the hill of Ekeberg, Norway, on a path with a safety railing. The faint city and landscape represent the view of Oslo and the Oslo Fjord. At the bottom of the Ekeberg hill was the madhouse where Edvard Munch’s sister was kept, and nearby was also a slaughterhouse. Some accounts describe that in those times you could actually hear the cries of animals being killed, as well as the cries of the mentally disturbed patients in the distance. In this setting, Edvard Munch was likely inspired by screams that he actually heard in this area, combined with his personal inner turmoil. Edvard Munch wrote in his diary that his inspiration for The Scream came from a memory of when he was walking at sunset with two friends, when he began to feel deeply tired. He stopped to rest, leaning against the railing. He felt anxious and experienced a scream that seemed to pass through all of nature. The rest is left up to an endless range of interpretations, all expressed from this one, provocative image.
The Real (And Not at All Universal) Meaning Behind Edvard Munch's The Scream
Edvard, came from a grim and deeply religious family. His father, a military doctor, married a woman 20 years his junior, who hailed from a once well-to-do clan that had fallen on hard times. She bore five children, of which Edvard was the second, and she died early, leaving behind a tragic letter to her family saying, “We all, who God so carefully has bound together, may meet in Heaven never to part again.” Munch’s dad became morose and fanatical; he would read this letter aloud to his clan at the dinner table, regularly, and lecture his kids on the horrors of hell that awaited them if they strayed from the righteous path. This fatalistic atmosphere definitively colored Munch’s view of the world.
Which brings us back to “The Scream,” actually originally known as “The Scream of Nature.”
I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
Notice anything about this tale? “The Scream” is often taken as an image of personal isolation or alienation. But it is significant that the scene takes place in public, not in some lonely interior (of which there are many in Munch’s work). Whatever emotion is seizing the wailing central figure, it comes upon him not when he is isolated, but when he is “walking along the road with friends,” represented by the strolling couple glimpsed in the painting behind him, apparently oblivious to the drama taking place in the foreground.
The key to the image is that its terrifying epiphany is felt to be an expression issuing through the figure from the landscape or the cosmos itself (“I felt the great scream in nature”). This is what Munch’s then-radical Expressionist styling, in which everything — sky and sea and the wailing, deformed figure itself — conveys so perfectly, depicting a universe fully animate with turbulent emotional meaning.
Munch was trained to see the universe as being filled with divine meaning, as subject to a plan — but he also could no longer fully believe in this plan. And so the universe speaks but has no voice, shrieks but makes no sound, issues forth a sense of loss that transcends any human fellowship.
Regards,
Ismail R Raslan
Special thanks to Dr.Rakan Nazer
