The Scream, 1893

http://www.edvardmunch.org/the-scream.jsp

Madonna, 1894
http://www.edvardmunch.org/madonna.jsp

Puberty, 1894
http://www.edvardmunch.org/puberty.jsp

The Sick Child, 1906-07

http://www.edvardmunch.org/the-sick-child.jsp

Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was born in Lten, Norway, on December 12, 1863. At a young age
he lost both of his parents and two siblings, a traumatic experience that he carried
throughout his life in his art. He started his art career in Norway and for twenty years
after 1885, he painted in Paris and Berlin. His style was so new and shocking that one of
his shows was shut down in 1892. Munch suffered from an anxiety disorder, which
became more serious as time passed. He eventually returned to Norway in 1909 where
he spent the remainder of his life. He died on January 23, 1944.
He left 1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, 4500 drawings and watercolors and 6
sculptures to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tyen in his honor. The
museum houses the broadest collection of his works. His works are also represented in
major museums and galleries in Norway and abroad. Munch appears on the Norwegian
1000 Kroner note along with pictures inspired by his artwork.
Style/Significance:
Munch is one of the main forces behind the Expressionist movement. His work
contains a very strong sense of emotion, brought out through brilliant colors and a
highly stylized way of painting. Most of his pieces contain an expressive orange-red color
that is very dominant in the image. This color is often used with a black, bringing out the
other colors for more contrast and expression.
A majority of the work which Edvard Munch, does showcase emotion, more often
than not, and more so than any true external view of the images which he was creating
Munch of his work depicts life and death scenes, love and terror, and the feeling of
loneliness was often a feeling which viewers would note that his work patterns focused
on. These emotions were depicted by the contrasting lines, the darker colors, blocks of
color, somber tones, and a concise and exaggerated form, which depicted the darker
side of the art which he was designing. These tones and shadows were used, to depict
the emotions the images were feeling, which seemed to come from the deep seated
feelings which Edvard Munch tended to keep in when he was painting and creating any
art form that he worked on.
Aside from paintings, Munch also did a number of woodcuts, lithographs, and
etchings, which are important to both the recognition of new mediums and bringing in
a more graphic style.

Famous Pieces of Edvard Munch

The Scream (The Cry)

Puberty
Madonna
Vampire
The Kiss
The Sick Child

About The Scream (The Cry -1893)

The Norwegian artist Edvard Munchs painting The Scream was painted in 1893 during a
unique transitional period in art history. The Scream was painted after the end of the photographic
Realist era, when artists wanted to show off their technical skills. The Scream was also painted
right before the Expressionists and other artists of the early skills. The Scream was also painted
right before the Expressionists and other artists of the early twentieth century made it a trend to
put a focus on the expression of their inner feelings and emotions through their art rather than
displaying how realistically they could paint an image or objet.
In May 2012, Munch's The Scream went on the auction block, selling at Sotheby's
in New York for more than $119 milliona record-breaking pricesealing its reputation
as one of the most famous and important works of art ever produced.
The Scream is often described as the first expressionistic picture, and is the most
extreme example of Munchs soul paintings. The facial expression depends to a large
degree on the paintings dynamics, the colors and lines. The scene and particularly the
foreground figure are grotesquely distorted and rendered in colors that are not taken
from external reality. Coming as it does from Munchs own inner hell, the painting
visualizes

desperate

aspect

of

fin-de-sicle:

anxiety

and

apocalypse.

The

percussiveness of the motif shows that it also speaks to our day and age.
We do know that this scene had a real location, an overlook along a road
traversing the Ekeberg hill, southeast of Oslo. From this vantage point one can see Oslo,
the Oslo Fjord, and the island of Hovedya.
How the artist did used the element of the art
The Scream was painted using tempera and pastel on board. It depicts, at face
value, one central figure that has his/her hands over their ears while two figures walk
into the distance. The scenery is a sunset and a sea or river. The brush strokes cause

the scene to appear to swirl, giving it a sense of motion. Munch, in this context could be
seen to be struggling to come to term with his anguish, expressing in terms of color and
shape.
Munch uses color to express his emotional reactions to his environment,
commenting on the red sky and the bluish black fjord, described almost as an allconsuming black hole hell where tongues of fire savagely lick at the frazzled and
overwhelmed subject, unidentifiable as either a man or woman.
Munchs use of vibrant color, expressive line, and distorted form transformed the
act of seeing into one of feeling. Freed from the traditional boundaries of narrative, The
Screams full force arises, not simply from the subjects in the painting, but from the
vicious tonalities and sweeping lines that define the tortured figure in the foreground as
they simultaneously envelop and suffocate him.
Color not only reaffirms the tension but further enhances it, to the point of
rendering the viewing experience uneasy. Yellow and red battle with the blues and the
greens, the skyline becomes the front line.
On the other hand, the curvature of the brush stokes representing water seem to
denote that it is gradually encroaching upon all life forms. This includes the boat which
seems to be on the brink of getting consumed by the infuriating power of the sea and
the two men who seem to be in a melancholy state of mind.
Now lets look at the lines, the curves, and the waxes in his painting. They all
suggest a perpetual movement, unbalanced. The whole painting is moving, except for
the bridge. The character himself seems to be on the move.
The flowing curves of art nouveau represent a subjective linear fusion imposed
upon nature, whereby the multiplicity of particulars is unified into a totality of organic
suggestion with feminine overtones.
After viewing this painting, the viewer is left with an eerie feeling of anxiety from
the contrasting colors, swirling nature, and utter agony of the twisted individual that is
the focus of the piece.
The sky. Mustard and orange uneasily combine in a sky that is fiery without being
beautiful, turbulent without being dynamic, in fact not a natural sky at all but an inner
mood. Munch expresses the narcissism of despair when everything, even the light of the
sky, seems to mirror the self.

Two people in the background. The figures in the background as melancholy

and lost as the screamer. In a painting of Oslo City Center, Munch shows a whole crowd
of zombie like yellow faced people on the way home from word. The misery of the other
people in this scene is important as it shows Munch is not portraying a private crisis but
what he sees as the modern condition.
The fjor. The eerie ship on the fjord looks like draculas vessel comes to bring
death. The sea looks utterly still, and lifeless, like a puddle of tears.
The face. This face does not scream rather it is a scream. The strange shape of
the ghoulish head, imitated so universally, emanates, like a ripple, from the open mouth.
The sound of the scream expressed as an oval of black lips, vibrates through every
muscle turning the face itself into an echo of the silent shriek.
The wooden railing. The rush of the railing away into the distance is dizzying,
sick, and unbalanced perception of space hurtling from the sufferer in an exaggerated
disorienting persecution that induces nausea.

b. Munch is said to have suffered severe depressions, which would go some way to
explaining the angst and horror conveyed in his art. Munch, in this context, could be
seen to be struggling to come of Munchs work, and the visually direct way this content
is communicated. Although The Scream was, for Munch, intensely personal, the anxiety
and anguish it conveys is universal. Such was the condition of Munch's mind, as he
succinctly noted in his personal diary. Through his famous poem that has supposedly
inspired The Scream, he describes himself walking on a bridge with his friends when the

sky turns lurid and devastatingly red. He hears Nature's shrill cry that is brought upon
her by the world torn apart in shreds on the brink of modernism.
Here, however, in depicting his own morbid experience, he has let go, and allowed the
foreground figure to become distorted by the subjective flow of nature; the scream could
be interpreted as expressing the agony of the obliteration of human personality by his
unifying force. Significantly, although, it was Munch himself who underwent the
experience depicted, the protagonist bears no resemblance to him or anyone else. The
creature in the foreground has been depersonalized and crushed into soullessness or, if
anything, stamped with a trace of the femininity of the world that has come close to
assimilating it.
c.

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ommons/thumb/d/d2/Edvard_Munch_1933.jpg/300px-Edvard_Munch_1933.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edvard_Munch_1921.jpg