Here you can see the most recognizable and known picture of Edvard Munch -
"The Scream".
This expressionist picture was painted in 1893 with oil, and shows us an agonised human figure against a backgroung of the red sky. There are other three versions of
Screem exist. The
Munch Museum holds one of two painted versions painted in 1910 and one pastel. Another painted version is that you are now looking at - in our
National Gallery of Norway. And there is another one pastel version owned by Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen.
The original German title given to the work by Munch was
Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature). The Norwegian word
skrik is usually translated as
scream, but is cognaite with the English
shriek. Occasionally, the painting has been called
The Cry.
Munch himself described his inspiration for the image thus:
I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
One theory advanced to account for the reddish sky in the background is that the powerful volcanic
eruption of Krakatoa tinted the sky red in parts of the Western hemisphere for a few months in 1883 and 1884, about a decade before Munch painted
The Scream. This explanation has been disputed by scholars who note that Munch was an expressive painter and was not primarily interested literal renderings of what he had seen. Alternatively, it has been suggested that the proximity of both a slaughterhouse and a madhouse to the site depicted in the painting may have offered some inspiration.
In 1978, the Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested that the strange, sexless creature in the foreground of the painting was probably inspired by a
Peruvian mummy, which Munch could have seen at the 1889
Exposition Universelle in Paris.
