The Scream

The Scream. Edvard Munch. 1893 C.E. Tempera and pastels on cardboard.

• Edvard Munch’s The Scream may be the most iconic human figure in the history of Western art.
• Its androgynous, skull-shaped head, elongated hands, wide eyes, flaring nostrils and ovoid mouth have been ingrained in our collective cultural consciousness. 
• Swirling blue landscape and fiery orange and yellow sky.
• The various renditions show the artist’s creativity and his interest in experimenting with the possibilities to be obtained across an array of media, while the work’s subject matter fits with Munch’s interest at the time in themes of relationships, life, death, and dread. 
• The Scream is in fact a surprisingly simple work, in which the artist utilized a minimum of forms to achieve maximum expressiveness.
•  The bridge, a landscape of shoreline/lake, and the sky, which is activated with curving lines in tones of orange, yellow, red, and blue-green. 
• Foreground and background blend into one another, and the lyrical lines of the hills ripple through the sky as well. 
• Bridge’s strict linearity provides a contrast with the shapes of the landscape and the sky. 
• Figure’s body, hands, and head take up the same curving shapes that dominate the background landscape.
• Munch’s approach to the experience of synesthesia, or the union of senses results in the visual depiction of sound and emotion. 
• An important inspiration for the Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century. 
• Munch sought to express internal emotions through external forms and thereby provide a visual image for a universal human experience.
• Figure walking along a wharf; boats at sea in the distance; long thick brushstrokes; figure cries out in horrifying scream; discordant colors symbolize anguish; swirling patterns