The Scream Made By Edvard Munch
(why is it so interesting and what does it mean)
The Scream
Edvard Munch
You’ve probably seen this painting before whether you saw it in person or don’t know the name of it. You’ve seen it before and I know you were thinking “Is the man in the painting an Alien?,” “Who are the men in the back?,” or “What does it mean?”
Growing Up
Edvard Munch is the painter of The Scream. Growing up Edvard had a hard life; his elder sister died of tuberculosis. A condition that was spreading all around the globe at the time. He made a painting based on his sister’s experience called “The Sick Child”.
The Sick child
Edvard Munch
Edvard got sick a lot during his childhood so he was in and out of school. “Illness, insanity, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life” Munch said. When he was sick he would spend time with himself and art. When his father saw him drawing and painting he saw the act as a disgrace. His father saw it as an “ unholy trade.”
How The Scream Came to Be
The scream is Edvard Munch’s most famous of all his paintings. He finished two versions in 1893 and many other versions for the rest of his life.
How Munch made this painting and how he thought of it is a separate story all together.
As Munch was walking by his friends going ahead of him. He had an experience in that experience he said that he saw “The sun was setting and the clouds turned as red as blood. I sensed a scream passing through nature. I felt as though I could actually hear the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds like real blood. The colors shrieked.”
After a while The Scream was presented to the public during the year of 1893 and was donated to the National Gallery.
Later on in life he made many other versions of the scream: two paintings with tempera, and two drawings with pastel and crayon.
The versions of the Scream By Edvard Munch
Fame
Out of all the paintings that Edvard Munch made, The Scream is his most famous. It sold at Sotheby’s for around $120 million dollars
The Scream has been adapted into a movie. Named just as the painting. The Scream’s ghostly figure’s face is now being used as a face to indicate universal horror. The painting’s figure was also used to make the scream emoji.
Many people say that The Scream painting “has a symbol of existential angst and human despair.” Others say that “The Scream remains iconic, partly because there is something deeply relatable in Munch’s depiction of the experience of mental illness.”
But what do you think about The Scream?
Sources
Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Scream-by-Munch
Art and Culture Google
Elephant Magazine
