The Scream is well established as the epitome of Munch's work as an artist. The painting, which seethes with movement, appears to be painted with an explosive force and the result is a genuine expression of an agitated mind. It has become recognised as the actual mental image of the existential angst of civilised man. With this motif, Munch departs from the central perspective field on whose stage painting had been played out since the Renaissance. In Philosophie der Kunst, Schopenhauer claimed that the limit of the power of expression of a work of art was its inability to reproduce a scream,'das Geschrei', precisely the title which Munch was to give his motif. He appeared almost to have wished to correct the claim of the philosopher, and his solution of the problem rests on contemporary theories of synaesthesia, where light and colour impulses can produce an impression of sound, and vice versa. A gouache in the Munch Museum, dated 1892, shows Munch experimenting, finding his way towards the final form of the picture. Here, Munch has also written one of his many versions of the lyric prose text associated with the motif:
I was out walking with two friends - the sun began to set -
suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and
leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the
blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood
there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an endless scream passing
through nature.
www.munch.museum.no
