Edvard Munch

The Scream is one of the most disturbing and famous paintings of modern times. Munch’s mother died when he was only five, and his beloved sister eleven years later, and these two tragic events in his early life affected his psychological health. Ill as a child, he had several nervous collapses as an adult, and in 1908-9 was one of the first people to be treated with electric shock therapy. He was outstandingly good-looking, drank far too much, never married, and seems at times to have regarded women as devouring, destructive creatures, in spite of or perhaps because of his extended love affairs.

Munch was an Expressionist painter: one who deliberately rejects fidelity to nature, which the Impressionists had striven for, in favour of a simplified and emphatic use of line and colour which carries great emotional impact. It was a movement which took strongest hold in Germany and Northern Europe at the start of this century, and Munch was one of its founders. The darkest recesses of his emotional life were his subject. He said, ‘Art is the opposite of Nature. A work of • art can only come from inside a person. Art is the shape of the picture fashioned through the nerves, heart, brain and eye of a man.’

Munch has left us an exact description of how he came to invent the image of The Scream. He was taking a walk one evening, feeling tired and ill, and in this mood observed the sun setting over the sea and the clouds burning fiery-red. He was possessed by a consuming fear, and felt in the fibres of his being a loud, unending scream piercing nature. The painting that resulted is one of a cycle of pictures Munch called The Frieze of Life in which he revealed his deepest feelings about life, love and death. Through them all runs the undulating line of the shore and the waves of the sea.

The face is transfixed and frozen, contorted in a dreadful, anguished scream of fear and pain, and the sunset a fiery blood-red, like the sunset that inspired it. The swirls of rough paint flow across the painting as though they are about to engulf the foreground figure. Behind are two mysterious people: perhaps they stand for approaching death. Man at the mercy of terrible forces beyond his control, forces within himself maybe, is exposed in this strange, powerful and unnerving painting.