Contrast and Compare Essay Starry Night and the Scream

¶ … pain, Van Gogh had somewhat of a twin. Edvard Munch, the painter of the famous Scream and Vincent Van Gogh, the painter of the widely popular Starry Night, were both deeply affected expressionist painters that saw French impressionism and admired Gauguin's symbolic boldness and abstract qualities. By depicting nightmarish lithographs of depraved sexuality, some of Munch's images harkened back to Gauguin. However, the similarities between Van Gogh and Munch are clear even if the work seems at opposite ends of the spectrum, marked with several differences.

To begin, both artists were influenced by expressionism, therefore there are similarities in the way both painters drew their subjects. While there is no one person in Starry Night, the wavy quality of the brush strokes is similar to The Scream. Both coming from Northern Europe (Van Gogh from Netherlands and Munch from Norway), expressionism existed in several regions, with Germany in particular. What expressionists do is show pain, spiritual and physical suffering in a way that is both haunting and evocative. Impressionists, which Starry Night looks influenced by, involves a deep admiration of the beauty of the landscape. The Scream looks like an interpretation of pain in the sense of overcoming fear.

Color is a link that binds the two painters together. While some of Van Gogh's work, including Starry Night is considered part of post-impressionism, both Van Gogh and Munch are thought of as expressionist painters. Color was a means of expressing an emotion for both these painters and was done so with The Scream and its blues and greens contrasting with the reddish browns of the sky and dock. Starry Night has a dark, haunting centerpiece amidst a bright and tranquil setting, creating that contrast through color seen in The Scream.

Another similarity are the meanings behind both paintings and how the emotion is represented in each one respectively. Munch painted The Scream after a sunset he experienced while walking with his friends. When the 'tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord' (Ferguson 22), Munch felt the infinite and grand scream of nature, creating the sense of fear that crept up on him. That swirling and turbulent emotion is displayed in the bright, spinning colors and the waves of both the main subject and the background. The person, his hands, the shape of his head rest on a wave that is then moved by the waves of the scenery.

The same can be seen in Starry Night with the exception that the swirls and waves are smaller, but still highly indicative of intensity and emotion. They are also gently moving, but being blocked by a large cypress bush that looks dark and ominous much like the background in The Scream. "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily,' he wrote. 'In order to express myself forcibly'." (Gardner, Kleiner and Mamiya 735) Perhaps the bush represented something that was bother Van Gogh at the time and so instead of denying his feelings through the sky, he painted a large dark shape to block the serenity of the scene. Color and the swirling and dynamism of the night sky in Starry Night demonstrates the emotions that were often difficult for Van Gogh to express.

Noticing the differences, the main differences are the lack of a human subject in Starry Night and the focus on one individual in The Scream. Starry Night is a modern landscape painting. The emphasis is on the beauty of the landscape, especially the sky. Van Gogh uses the sky to express most of his emotion whereas Munch uses the singular figure to encompass the majority of his feelings. By having the man screaming on the dock with two figures walking away in the distance, it shows the loneliness and deep fear the artist had.

Losing his mother, then his sister to tuberculosis and having a father that was emotionally unavailable, life was hard on Munch. Living in poverty in his youth as well, created a sense of uncertainty and instability. Perhaps that day that when he decided to go for a walk and witnessed the color changes of the sky, he realized just how unstable his foundation was. That unstable foundation was also found in Van Gogh, but not for those reasons.