The Scream by Edvard Munch: The first time Munch described the experience which gave rise to this painting was in Nice, writing in his literary diary. The entry for 22 January 1892 reads:
"I was walking along the road with two friends.
The sun was setting.
I felt a breath of melancholy -
Suddenly the sky turned blood-red.
I stopped, and leaned against the railing, deathly tired -
looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword
over the blue-black fjord and town.
My friends walked on - I stood there, trembling with fear.
And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature."
The work depicts not so much an incident or a landscape as a state of mind. The drama is an inner one...
Excerpt from:
http://www.museumsnett.no/nasjonalgalleriet/munch/eng/index.html
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Comments
Modern man is in a dilemma because he 'knows' that he's trapped in a gigantic mudball swirling around the sun, in an ocean of impersonal darkness and vacuum. There is no ultimate, transcendent meaning in life. No Creator.
But he desperately needs to find meaning and despair in the absurdity of it all. Bcos he knows it's all a freak of nature. Maybe that's The Scream that Much is conveying... a personal being in despair, fear, angst that the impersonal nature is all there is, and has no place for him.
So he authenticates his own existence by sheer force of will... It's like Titanic is sinking but at least, I can put up a brave front and raise a fist in defiance of it all.
But that too, in the end, is vanity of vanities!
It's been stolen now, no wonder the guy is always screaming!