The Scream is famous perhaps because it manages to powerfully express human emotion. The artist Edvard Munch wasn’t interested in realistically depicting the external world but in representing the experience of such emotional states as loneliness, jealousy, love, despair, and grief. In The Scream he captures feelings of anxiety and existential dread using undulating lines that press in on the central figure like shock waves, reducing it to a swaying form with features made up of a series of gaping ovals. The swelling lines visually contrast with the straight path on which the figure and two others are walking. Munch accentuated this effect by showing that the figure’s two companions, who are seen walking away, are unscathed, thus implying that the trauma came from his own mind rather than the world outside.
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