Painting of Munch the Scream

Edvard Munch's The Scream is perfectly poised at the position between several artistic periods and movements including Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and Symbolism, and the painting bears elements of all three of these. As the text puts it, Munch was "prolific, and throughout his life experimented with many different themes, palettes, and styles of drawing. (p. 85). The painting The Scream is clearly influenced by the "sinuous, constantly moving, curving line of Art Nouveau, combined with color dark of hue but brilliant in intensity," (Text p. 85). Additionally, the painting also reveals influences from Gauguin and other post-impressionists (Text, p. 85). The Scream belies the "symbolist tendencies" of Munch, as well as showing how the Norwegian artist would be the forebear of Expressionism (Text, p. 85). Impossible to pigeonhole, Munch's The Scream reveals a combination of Art Nouveau, Symbolist, and Expressionist trends.

As an Expressionist piece, The Scream literally does express an intense emotional state. The subject of the painting is caught mid-scream. As the text puts it, the subject's scream appears as an "agonizing shriek translated into bands of color that echo like sound waves across the landscape and through the blood-red sky," (p. 85). Munch does not attempt to hold back or subdue these emotions, but rather, aims to put them on full display for the viewer to behold and experience viscerally with him. In addition to bearing the hallmark features of Expressionism, The Scream also contains psychological symbolism related to the fear of death and possibly fear related to sexual expression (Text, p. 86). Other Expressionistic artists like Kandinsky veered towards abstraction in their work, but still incorporated similar features of the genre such as intense colors and long curvilinear compositions. Expressionist art frequently took the art world by storm, evident in the way Munch was not well received when he displayed his work in Paris in 1892 (Text, p. 85).

Historically, Expressionism and Symbolism concurred with Freudian theory and psychoanalytical philosophy and practice. Freud had been publishing his theories on the human subconscious at the same time Munch was painting works like The Scream, which contains the exact themes that Freud wrote about such as anxiety. As the text points out, Munch uses the canvas to depict issues regarding sickness and death, which haunted him throughout his personal life and therefore became themes in his painting (p. 84). The Scream has since become a "familiar symbol of modern anxiety and alienation," (Text, p. 85). Modern anxiety and alienation such as which Munch conveys on the canvas can be related to several historical events and trends such as urbanization and industrialization. Gone were the days of innocent rural life with extended households and collectivism. In their place was a sense of loneliness and introspection, evidenced by the trend towards psychoanalysis. The promise of capitalist enterprise and the free market economy had been shown to be detrimental to the well-being of workers, something that sociologists of the time also associated with alienation.

By this time, art was being created for art's sake. Work like The Scream were not being commissioned by wealthy patrons. On the contrary, post-Impressionist painters like Van Gogh fought hard and often failed to earn a living. It is possible that Munch's anxiety shown in The Scream was related to his own existential anxieties about not only death but financial solubility. One secondary source chosen to substantiate research on Munch is published by an Edvard Munch Website. This secondary source was chosen over others because there were few articles that addressed the general issues I wanted to discuss in my analysis of The Scream. Although there are whole books dedicated to Munch, I felt it would be more straightforward to discover the answers to the core questions about the painting and the artistic era in which Munch painted on this website. Indeed, the Website provides interesting supplementary information about the artist that clarifies the subject matter of The Scream. For example, there is some evidence to suggest that Munch may have been showing signs of mental illness, as "several facts indicate Munch was aware of the danger of an art of this sort for a neurotic humanist like himself," ("The Scream, 1893 by Edvard Munch," 2011). Munch painted several versions of The Scream, and atop one on display in Norway he wrote, "Can only have been painted by a madman," ("The Scream, 1893 by Edvard Munch," 2011). It is no coincidence, then, that Munch's characteristic and disturbing Expressionist and Symbolist work coincided with the emergence of Freudian theory.