The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is so famous perhaps because of his unique ability to give visual form to human emotion. He wasn’t interested in realistically depicting the external world but to represent the human experience of such emotional states as loneliness, jealousy, love, despair, and grief. His best-known painting The Scream (1893) seems to portray the spiritual anguish of living in the modern world through abstraction. The work centers on a swaying corpselike figure, neither male nor female. Their eyes are wide, their mouth opened in perfect oval, and their hands desperately covering their ears. The undulating body echoes in the swirling lines of the blood-red sky.
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