He writes in The Guardian: “By removing all individuality from this being, Munch allows anyone to inhabit it. Finally, a lithograph stone was produced in 1895 – and it is a rare black-and-white print from this that the British Museum will display.Īuthor Kelly Grovier suggests: “Given Munch’s anxieties about modern culture, it is easy to see how the newly patented symbol of science, the light bulb, may have merged in the artist’s mind with the mien of the evocative mummy, an unsettling relic of a civilization long since extinguished.”īut it is the ambiguous, unknowable nature of this strange figure which is the key to The Scream’s universal appeal, argues art critic Jonathan Jones. The city’s Munch Museum houses a pastel version from the same year, along with a second painted version from 1910 – which was also stolen, in 2004, and also later recovered.Ī second pastel version, dating from 1895, is the only one of the four in private hands, and sold for $120 million at auction in 2012 – a record at the time. The painting was stolen in 1994 but recovered undamaged shortly afterwards in a sting operation. In 1893 he painted what would be the first of four versions of The Scream, which is today housed at the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo. Munch became increasingly preoccupied with the tensions caused by urbanisation, advances in science and the moral dilemmas of a world on the brink of great change. He studied at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania before travelling to Paris and Berlin, embracing a bohemian lifestyle, cultivating a network of fellow artists and thinkers, and developing a style that broke with artistic tradition. “Without this anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder.” “For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art,” Munch wrote. It’s the largest show of Munch’s prints in the UK for 45 years, and will offer a revealing look into his turbulent psyche.Įdvard Munch on the trunk in his studio, 1902 | Photo: Munchmuseet, courtesy British Museum This became The Scream.”Īn 1895 lithograph print of the work, one of several versions Munch created, is the main draw of a new exhibition, Edvard Munch: Love and Angst, at the British Museum in April. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. “I sensed a scream passing through nature it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I stopped and looked out over the fjord - the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. “One evening I was walking along a path the city was on one side and the fjord below,” Munch wrote, describing his inspiration for the painting. It has become the ultimate image of existential crisis, the original Nordic Noir. It’s the first painting to have spawned its own emoji – the ‘face screaming in fear’. You’ll find adaptations and parodies of it on student bedroom walls, on protesters’ placards and in political cartoons. Yet this visceral, doom-laden work – a reflection of the Norwegian artist’s troubled state of mind at the end of the 19th Century – has grown to permeate every aspect of popular culture, from film and TV to memes and tattoos. Oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard | Image: National Gallery of Norway
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