The Scream
What is the story behind The Scream?
In what museum is The Scream?
Why is The Scream so famous?
The Scream, painting by Edvard Munch that became his most famous work. He completed two versions in 1893, another in 1895, and yet another in 1910.
Inspiration
The Scream is one of the most familiar images in modern art and a precursor to Expressionism. The painting resembles a literary sketch that Munch frequently rewrote, describing a stroll where he becomes overwhelmed with anxiety. In one version he composed the following scene: “The sun was setting and the clouds turned as red as blood. I sensed a scream passing through nature. I felt as though I could actually hear the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds like real blood. The colors shrieked.”
Description
Munch represented the scream passing through nature as a series of 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 contours 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. It is conjectured that the central figure in the painting is modeled on an Inca mummy that Munch saw in a Parisian museum while visiting the World’s Fair there in 1889. Whatever the case, on a copy of the picture, Munch wrote: “Could only have been painted by a madman.”
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Popularity
The first version of the painting was untitled, while the second bore the German title Geschrei. Known in English as The Scream, the work has become a popular representation of the human condition and an icon of the anxiety of modern life. It was an immediate sensation, reproduced widely in art magazines and appearing as the cover illustration for a book on mental illness and art as early as 1908. The painting’s central figure has appeared throughout Western popular culture in everything from television to emoji, and it has been parodied in motion pictures, including, arguably, Macaulay Culkin’s iconic grimace in John Hughes’s Home Alone.
One gauge of the work’s popularity is that several times it has been the object of art thieves, twice successfully: One version was stolen from Oslo’s National Gallery (now part of the National Museum) in 1994 and recovered several months later, while another was stolen at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in Oslo and recovered two years later. The work is undeniably valuable, with still another pastel version selling at auction for a record $120 million in 2012.