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Year: 1893.
Type: Oil, tempera, pastel and crayon on cardboard.
Movement: Proto-Expressionism
Dimensions: 91 cm × 73.5 cm (36 in × 28.9 in)
Location: National Gallery and Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway
In the foreground there is a man shouting with both hands on his cheecks. He is in a landscape scene in which there is a fenced path leading away in diagonal perspective.
In the background we can appreciate a bood-scarlet sky, that accentuates the feeling of the man.
Proto-Abstract Expressionism was a transitional stage in the 1940s in which the developing Abstract Expressionists produced the works that led directly to the later movement.
In its most obvious style of representation, Expressionist painting is lyric and dramatic. It tends to stretch human emotions, and in particular the emotions of sorrow and anxiety, to a point of pronounced tension. It is a style of painting that captures the sadness, unhappiness, and fear that imprison humanity, and thus it is first and foremost a drama in which attention is concentrated on the message communicated to us by the characters. Pure landscapes may also be called «Expressionist,» but only when the character conferred upon them is able to endow them with an expression suggesting or revealing a human emotion.
From people's view, the painting expresses feelings of anguish, fear and anxiety.
It looks like the man is losing his mind. Taking a deep look, you can notice how his body is so bendy and fluid and his head almost looks like a skull. This means that the man because of his anxiety, has become less substantial.
It was stolen not once, but twice!
The first time was in 1994 from the National Gallery in Oslo. Luckily, it was found and returned within three months. Armed gunmen broke into the Munch Museum in 2004, stealing a different version of The Scream. Both paintings remained missing until 2006.
This sketch of Despair from 1892.
This sketch came before The Scream, and perhaps shows the moment of isolation Munch felt just before the 'scream ripped through nature.
The Scream's powerful expression has proliferated into everyday life.
Nowadays is one of only a handful of artworks to be turned into an emoji:
The figure in The Scream may have been inspired by a mummy.
Inspired on the Peruvian mummy on display in Paris at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1889.
Born: 12 December 1863 in
Ådalsbruk, Løten, Sweden–Norway.
Died: 23 January 1944 (aged 80) in Oslo, Norway.
Nationality: Norwegian.
Known for: Painting and graphic artist.
Notable work: The Scream, Madonna, The Sick Child.
Movement: Expressionism.
Munch was born into a middle-class family that was plagued with ill health. His mother died when he was five, his eldest sister when he was 14, both of tuberculosis; Munch eventually captured the latter event in his first masterpiece, The Sick Child (1885–86). Munch’s father and brother also died when he was still young, and another sister developed mental illness. “Illness, insanity, and death,” as he said.
From 1892 to 1908 he lived in Germany, mainly in Berlin, although he made frequent trips to Norway and Paris. In Berlin in 1892 he presented an exhibition that had to be withdrawn due to the scandal he caused and which led to the creation of the Berlin Secession. In Norway he soon counted among his friends important political and literary personalities and had a particular affinity with the social realism of the playwright Henrik Ibsen, for whom he created the sets and costumes for the play Peer Gynt in 1896.
In 1908 Edvard Munch, after a stormy romantic relationship and a victim of alcohol, suffered a serious nervous illness, for which he had to be confined in Dr. Jacobsen's psychiatric hospital in Copenhagen, from which he emerged fully recovered. In 1908 he returned permanently to Norway, where he received some official commissions (paintings of the auditorium of the University of Oslo) and spent his last years in solitude. Munch bequeathed to the city of Oslo all the works that he kept until his death in 1944.
Munch showed a flair for drawing at an early age but received little formal training.
After spending a year at the Oslo Technical School, where he had begun engineering studies, in 1880 he made the decision to dedicate himself to painting, and for that purpose he enrolled in the city's School of Drawing. An important factor in his artistic development was the Kristiania Bohème, a circle of writers and artists in Kristiania (oslo). One of the older painters in the circle, Christian Krohg, gave Munch both instruction and encouragement.
In 1885 a scholarship allowed him to continue studying in Paris.
Due to his mental illness Munch painted pictures of the cry, as if in the hope of getting rid of the cry of his own soul. So, the screaming figure looks like a skeleton, or an embryo, or a sperm cell. Such associations she causes many. The lines of the landscape are undulating, as if showing an echo, as if a cry were heard from all sides. Emotions of the model are extremely negative.
In his diary some records were found that lead to certain conclusions.
Love: here Munch refers to the first love of his life, Millie Thaulow. A married woman he called "Mrs. Heiberg." Not being able to have it and wanting it constantly made him do some works where he shows us his lived scenes.
Heartbreak: These are the scenes that reflect Munch's true identity. His harrowing childhood and his days at the side of his dying mother.
Death: Here we see scenes that remind him of the death of his mother and sister. Death represents it through a simple farewell between two lovers, or a farewell to a loved one who is about to leave this world. But that same death is also reflected in an absence that paralyzes many and that inevitably causes us a heartrending cry.