The Scream (1893)

Artwork description & Analysis: The significance of Munch's The

Scream within the annals of modern art cannot be overstated. It stands
among an exclusive group, including Van Gogh's Starry Night, Picasso's Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Matisse's Red Studio, comprising the
quintessential works of modernist experiment and lasting innovation. The
fluidity of Munch's lateral and vertical brushwork echoes the sky and clouds
in Starry Night, yet one may also find the aesthetic elements of Fauvism,
Expressionism, and perhaps even Surrealism arising from this same surface.

The setting of The Scream was suggested to the artist by a walk along a road
overlooking the city of Oslo, apparently upon Munch's arrival at, or departure
from, a mental hospital where his sister, Laura Catherine, had been interned.
It is unknown whether the artist observed an actual person in anguish, but this
seems unlikely; as Munch later recalled, "I was walking down the road with
two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I
stopped and leaned against the fence ... shivering with fear. Then I heard the
enormous, infinite scream of nature."

This is one of two painted versions of The Scream that Munch rendered
around the turn of the 20th century; the other (c. 1910) is currently in the
collections of the Munch Museum, Oslo. In addition to these painted versions,
there is a version in pastel and a lithograph.

Although The Scream has long been seen as a singular image – an anomaly
in its own time and a timeless icon of the modern psyche – the picture in fact
relates closely to others of the same period, both by Munch and his
contemporaries. Scenes of figures staring pensively into the distance were
common in Norwegian art. The key difference between most other
contemporary scenes and The Scream was the influence of Symbolism.
Munch had learnt much from the style of painters such as Paul Gauguin and
Vincent Van Gogh, and their example encouraged him to use bright color to
flatten his forms and to use dark outlines to lend them further force. The
undulating lines that Van Gogh deploys in works such as Eternity’s Gate may
have been a particularly important influence on Munch’s approach to The
Scream.

Considering that Eternity’s Gate was made in the highly-anguished last year
of Van Gogh’s life, the painting also provides a precedent for Munch’s image
of extreme distress.

Munch’s painting was inspired by a disturbing episode he had while out

walking friends in coastal Oslo at sunset. In the last light of day he was
overcome by a deathly tiredness and as he stopped to rest he saw "the
flaming clouds like bloodstained swords". Then shaking with fright he "felt how
a long unending scream was going through the whole of nature."

Although there is much that ties these two masterpieces together, ultimately, it
is unlikely that Van Gogh’s picture was a direct influence on The Scream as it
is unlikely Munch ever saw the earlier work.

While The Scream, like Eternity’s Gate, reflects the artist’s mental
disturbance, The Scream pushes into more amplified distortion and primitive
expression and is therefore categorized as an early example of
Expressionism.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The exhibition Munch: Van Gogh shows the two artists, who never met, shared a
passionate desire to paint the savage intensity of life – and it casts fresh light on the
Dutchman’s tragedy
 Jonathan Jones

Wed 23 Sep 2015 13.16 BSTLast modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 17.18 GMT

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Detail of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, left, compared with Vincent Van Gogh’s The Bridge at
Trinquetaille. The artists’ work is being shown in a joint exhibition in Amsterdam. Photograph: Reuters

A gunshot and a scream reverberate through the yellow house, echo across the fjord,
and fill a new exhibition at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam with pity and terror.
In 1890 Vincent van Gogh fatally shot himself in the French countryside. Three years
later the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was walking near Oslo’s fjord at sunset. As
the sun went down, he remembered years later, he was seized by a dreadful vision:

“The air became like blood – with piercing strands of fire ... I felt a great scream – and I
actually heard a great scream.”

Munch’s 1893 crayon drawing The Scream, on loan from Oslo’s Munch Museum, now
hangs near Van Gogh’s Wheatfield under Thunderclouds, which he painted in the last
months of his life. The sky for Van Gogh has become a gorgeously thick and wet, yet
oppressively dense and massive smear of blue and white. Meanwhile the sky for Munch,
in The Scream, is a sinister aurora borealis, a radioactive blaze. We are left to guess what
Van Gogh’s blue soup of a sky says about his emotional state. Munch leaves no such
ambiguity. He portrays himself as a robed, monk-like figure, his eyes dots of pain in a
hairless skull, his mouth an oval of anguish.

Other walkers stand insensitive before the fjord. Only the isolated artist can hear the
scream that is tearing nature itself apart.

Seeing Munch and Van Gogh side by side is a journey to the birth of expressionism.
They never met, and Van Gogh never knew Munch existed – although Munch, who lived
until 1944, certainly got to know eventually about Van Gogh. Yet both artists intuited
something similar. They felt the world crying out to express itself in colours. They heard
a music, or a scream, in nature that connected artist and sky, artist and fields. The way
they set down this holistic, extreme sensitivity created a new kind of art.

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Vincent van Gogh’s The Yellow House (1888); and Red Virginia Creeper (1898-1900), by
Edvard Munch Photograph: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam/ Munch-Museet, Oslo
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Munch: Van Gogh compares some of the greatest masterpieces of two of the greatest
modern artists. Munch, besides one of his four versions of The Scream, is represented
by his even more terrifying vision of a house that seems to drip blood, Red Virginia
Creeper (1898-1900), his darkly erotic Madonna (1895-97), and many more such
shocking revelations of the fin de siecle. Van Gogh replies with works like Starry Night
over the Rhone (1888) and The Yellow House (1888). It is like a drama by Strindberg in
which the two most intense artists who ever lived rage in mutual madness.

Munch was the friend Van Gogh never found. Would he have been a better companion
than Gauguin?

Munch was the friend Van Gogh never found. The one man who might have understood
him. When he rented the Yellow House in Arles and decorated it with bright paintings of
sunflowers, Van Gogh was dreaming of utopia. He hoped this house would become an
art colony where painters worked like brothers. Instead he got Paul Gauguin as a house
guest and the dream ended in self harm and hospitalisation. Would Munch have been a
better painting companion? In his 1889 painting Summer Night: Inger on the Beach,
nature is a numinous, living presence that infuses the painting with inner light, just as
Van Gogh’s stars spark in the blue.

Both these northerners were set alight by French impressionism and both admired
Gauguin’s abstract, symbolic boldness. Munch’s nightmarish lithographs of lonely souls
and depraved sexuality owe more to Gauguin than Van Gogh does, even though it was
Van Gogh who lived with Gauguin. But the similarities between Munch and Van Gogh
are ultimately less telling than their differences.

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Self-Portrait as a Painter (1887-88) by Vincent van Gogh; and Self-Portrait with Palette (1926)
by Edvard Munch. Photograph: Reuters
If a psychiatrist were asked which of these painters was most troubled, the diagnosis
would be easy: Munch

This exhibition casts a radically new light on the tragedy of Van Gogh. If a psychiatrist
were asked which of these painters was affected by mental health issues, which was
most troubled, the diagnosis would be easy. Obviously, Munch is the morbid, seriously
disturbed artist here. It is Munch who wears sickness on his sleeve. It’s not just his self-
portrait as a screaming ghoul. What about his print Jealousy, in which a bearded youth
gazes big-eyed into nothingness while a woman shows her body to a voyeuristic man? Or
Red Virginia Creeper, in which blood covers a house and seeps into a muddy path, while
the same tortured face gazes into an abyss of horror?

By comparison Van Gogh is free from all morbidity, despair, or self-pity. He liked to
close his letters “with a handshake” and recommended smoking a pipe, like he did, to
stay sane and happy. His paintings, next to those of Munch, are golden dreams of
harmony and hope. He sees a magic in nature, a divine energy. The sound he hears is
not a scream but a shout of exultation.

Munch is a macabre poet of darkness, vampires, murder. His art is erotic and perverse.
Van Gogh, in the cornfield, is a believer. He is all love.

Until the crows come screaming.

They are both examples of post-impressionist paintings (albeit Munch tends to fall into the
Expressionist camp) who used color descriptively, symbolically, and expressively to depict
emotional and psychological trauma. Van Gogh’s painting preceded Munch’s by a few years
and the work of French (or in VG’s case: Dutch) post impressionists undoubtably had a
profound affect on the Norwegian Munch. Van Gogh’s painting was probably done from a
life study while Munch’s is entirely a work of imagination.

Both knew Paul Gauguin, In van Gogh’s case it was Vincent option to use a higher keyed
selection of colors that Gauguin called a synthetic palette. It is doubtful that Munch ever
met van Gogh, though the former was in Paris when the Nabis exhibited in the late 1880’s so
he would have been aware of their work.

A museum exhibition held in Oslo, Norway several years ago addressed this question in
great depth
 At Eternity’s Gate by Vincent Van Gogh was painted in 1890 just prior to Van Gogh shooting himself
and displays a man sitting in a chair burying his face in his hands. Van Gogh was a post-impressionist and
extended impressionism, the emphasis on the subjective rather than realism, while rejecting its
limitations by emphasizing geometric forms. Van Gogh was depressive and suffered from mental illness
which led to his eventual self-inflicted gunshot wound. This painting reflects the depression and
loneliness that he felt in the final days of his life.(Van Gogh, Wikipedia)

Its use of vivid colors that portray the man are contrasted by the dullness of the background. There is
a focus on the man, yet his face can not even be seen. The man is shown as being of old age and wearing
monochromatic clothing attracting the attention of the viewer to the face and hands of the man. The
man sits alone in a small room devoid of color and there is evoked a sense of loneliness. Not only is this
man literally alone, but his posture and expression of depression allude to a deeper loneliness within
him. His face is buried into his hands displays a state of utter hopelessness which captures the feelings
of the painter at that time. When one looks at this painting they see the unbridled emotions of a man on
the brink of suicide and the complete loneliness that he felt at that moment in time. (At Eternity's Gate,
Wikipedia)

The common theme between these paintings is loneliness. This intense sense of solitude is
shown in each painting’s grim and harsh portrayal of life. The focus of each painting is on a
single solitary character who is displaying some sense of suffering. The emotion of loneliness
displayed mainly through the expressions of the characters and their postures along with the
colors used. These paintings portray loneliness through one primary character. Loneliness in
one form or another is the main theme in these paintings.

The scream

An infamous example of depression portrayed in art, The Screamillustrates

the manic mind, and strikingly shows the madness within. Painted by Munch
in in 1893, The Scream is a semi-autobiographical depiction of his existential
crisis and manic depression. With the salient red sky and zombie like figure
in the middle of the madness, The Scream imitates the fear and turbulence of
a mind with mental deficiency. It shows that the world is full of fear and
isolation and sometimes the worst terror of all is living.

ETERNITY’S GATE
Prolific for his struggling mental being and inner turmoil, van Gogh’s art has
been an early staple for the depiction of mental illness. Institutionalised and
manic depressive for most of his later life, van Gogh used art to encapsulate
his feelings of isolation, sadness and resentment for the world. His 1890 oil
on canvas piece, Sorrowing Old Man (‘At Eternity’s Gate), encapsulates the
sorrow and grief of a man who is beyond the point of happiness. Finished just
two years before his suicide, the painting is an ode to his relapse into mental
despair and depressive deliriousness. The painting exemplifies the isolation
one goes through when left in a sordid state of mind. By using a strong blue
to highlight the main figure of the painting, van Gogh is physically showing
his depression and anxiety.

Munch painting
Toward the end of the 19th century, at about the same time renowned psychiatrist Freud was
investigating unconscious phenomena and the influence of childhood events on the causation of
neurosis, a little known Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944), began to express his
tormented inner world through his artistic creations, giving birth to an art style that would later be
known as Expressionism.

The most painful event in Edvard Munch's life was the premature death of his mother from
tuberculosis when he was five years old. This tragedy was compounded when his older sister,
Sophie, to whom he had become attached in her place, also died of tuberculosis when Munch
was thirteen. In addition to these two major losses during Munch's critical stages of
development, his father became emotionally unavailable when he suffered an agitated psychotic
depression, associated with religious preoccupations, after his wife's death. All this trauma was
intensified by the poverty experienced by the Munch family, despite the fact that Edvard's father
was a physician.

Edvard Munch, who never married, called his paintings his children and hated to be separated
from them. Living alone on his estate outside Oslo for the last 27 years of his life, increasingly
revered and increasingly isolated, he surrounded himself with work that dated to the start of his
long career. Upon his death in 1944, at the age of 80, the authorities discovered - behind locked
doors on the second floor of his house - a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and
15,391 prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks,
copperplates and photographs. Yet in a final irony of his difficult life, Munch is famous today as
the creator of a single image, which has obscured his overall achievement as a pioneering and
influential painter and printmaker
Munch's The Scream is an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time. As Leonardo da
Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and self-control, Munch defined how we see our
own age - wracked with anxiety and uncertainty. His painting of a sexless, twisted, fetal-faced
creature, with mouth and eyes open wide in a shriek of horror, re-created a vision that had
seized him as he walked one evening in his youth with two friends at sunset. As he later
described it, the "air turned to blood" and the "faces of my comrades became a garish yellow-
white." Vibrating in his ears he heard "a huge endless scream course through nature." He made
two oil paintings, two pastels and numerous prints of the image; the two paintings belong to
Oslo's National Gallery and to the Munch Museum, also in Oslo. Both have been stolen in
recent years, and the Munch Museum's is still missing. The thefts have only added posthumous
misfortune and notoriety to a life filled with both, and the added attention to the purloined image
has further distorted the artist's reputation.

With the aim of correcting the balance, a major retrospective of Munch's work, the first to be
held in an American museum in almost 30 years, opened last month at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City. "Everybody knows, but everybody doesn't know Munch," says Kynaston
McShine, the MoMA curator-at-large who organized the exhibition. "They all have the idea that
they know Munch, but they really don't."

The Munch who materializes in this show is a restless innovator whose personal tragedies,
sicknesses and failures fed his creative work. "My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my
illness," he once wrote. "Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder....My
sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their
destruction would destroy my art." Munch believed that a painter mustn't merely transcribe
external reality but should record the impact a remembered scene had on his own sensibility. As
demonstrated in a recent exhibition of self-portraits at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and
the Royal Academy of Arts in London, much of Munch's work can be seen as self-portraiture.
Even for an artist, he was exceptionally narcissistic. "Munch's work is like a visual
autobiography," McShine observes.

Although he began his artistic career as a student of Norwegian painter Christian Krohg, who
advocated the realistic depiction of contemporary life known as Naturalism, Munch developed a
psychologically charged and expressive style to transmit emotional sensation. Indeed, by the
time he raised his brush to the easel, he typically no longer paid attention to his model. "I do not
paint what I see, but what I saw," he once explained. Influenced as a young man by his
exposure in Paris to the work of Gauguin and van Gogh, who both rejected the academic
conventions of the official Salon, he progressed toward simplified forms and blocks of intense
color with the avowed purpose of conveying strong feelings. In early 1890, in a huff, Munch quit
the class of an esteemed Parisian painting teacher who had criticized him for portraying a rosy
brick wall in the green shades that appeared to him in a retinal afterimage. In ways that
antagonized the contemporary art critics, who accused him of exhibiting "a discarded half-
rubbed-out sketch" and mocked his "random blobs of color," he would incorporate into his
paintings graffiti-like scrawls, or thin his paint and let it drip freely.

The radical simplicity of his woodcut technique, in which he often used only one brilliant color
and exposed the grain of the wood on the print, can still seem startlingly new. For the woodcuts,
he developed his own method, incising the image with rough broad strokes and cutting the
finished woodblocks into sections that he inked separately. His printmaking style, as well as the
bold composition and color palette of his paintings, would deeply influence the German
Expressionists of the early 20th century, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and August Macke.
Characteristically, though, Munch shunned the role of mentor. He preferred to stand apart.

One of Munch's earliest memories was of his mother, confined with tuberculosis, gazing wistfully
from her chair at the fields that stretched outside the window of their house in Kristiania (now
Oslo). She died in 1868, leaving Edvard, who was 5, his three sisters and younger brother in the
care of her much older husband, Christian, a doctor imbued with a religiosity that often
darkened into gloomy fanaticism. Edvard's aunt Karen came to live with the family, but the boy's
deepest affection resided with Sophie, his older sister. Her death nine years later at age 15, also
of tuberculosis, lacerated him for life. Dying, she asked to be lifted out of bed and placed in a
chair; Munch, who painted many compositions of her illness and last days, kept that chair until
his death. (Today it is owned by the Munch Museum.)

Compounding Edvard's misery was his own fragile health. As Sue Prideaux recounts in her new
biography, Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream, he had tuberculosis and spit blood as a boy.
His father's expressed preference for the next world (an alarming trait in a physician) only
amplified the son's sense of death's imminence. One of Munch's finest self-portraits, a
lithograph of 1895, depicts his head and clerical-looking collar materializing out of a black
background; a thin white band at the top of the work contains his name and the year, and a
corresponding strip below features a skeletal arm. "I inherited two of mankind's most frightful
enemies - the heritage of consumption and insanity - illness and madness and death were the
black angels that stood at my cradle," he wrote in an undated private journal. In a never-ending
saga of woe, one of Edvard's sisters spent most of her life institutionalized for mental illness,
and his one brother, who had seemed atypically robust for a Munch, died suddenly of
pneumonia at 30. Only his youngest sister, Inger, who like him never married, survived into old
age.

Edvard's precocious talent was recognized early. How quickly his art (and his personality)
evolved can be seen from two self-portraits. A small, three-quarters profile on cardboard,
painted in 1881-82 when he was only 18, depicts the a rtist's classic good looks - straight nose,
cupid's-bow mouth, strong chin - with a fine brush and academic correctness. Five years later,
Munch's palette-knife work in a larger self-portrait is impressionistic and splotchy. His hair and
throat blur into the background; his lowered gaze and outthrust chin lend him an insolent air;
and the red rims of his eyes suggest boozy, sleepless nights, the start of a long descent into
alcoholism.

For a full-length portrait in 1889 of Hans Jaeger, the nihilist at the heart of the bohemian crowd
in Kristiania with whom Munch increasingly fraternized, the artist posed the notorious writer in a
slouch on a sofa with a glass tumbler on the table in front of him and a hat low on his forehead.
Jaeger's head is aslant and his eyes jut forward in a pose both arrogant and dissolute. Along
with psychological astuteness, the compelling portrait demonstrates Munch's awareness of
recent developments in painting. The dappled blue-and-gray brushwork of Jaeger's coat
suggests Impressionism, especially the works ofPaul Cezanne and Claude Monet, which the
Norwegian may have seen on trips to Paris in 1885 and 1889.
For Christian Munch, who was struggling to pay the expenses of his son's education, Edvard's
association with dubious companions was a source of anguish. Edvard, too, was torn. Though
he lacked his father's faith in God, he had nonetheless inherited his sense of guilt. Reflecting
later on his bohemian friends and their embrace of free love, he wrote: "God - and everything
was overthrown - everyone raging in a wild, deranged dance of life....But I could not set myself
free from my fear of life and thoughts of eternal life."

His first sexual experience apparently took place in the summer of 1885, when he was 21, with
Millie Thaulow, the wife of a distant cousin. They would meet in the woods near the charming
fishing village of Aasgaardstrand. He was maddened and thrilled while the relationship lasted
and tormented and desolate when Millie ended it after two years. The theme of a forlorn man
and a dominating woman fascinated Munch. In one of his most celebrated
images, Vampire (1893-94), a red-haired woman can be seen sinking her mouth into the neck of
a disconsolate-looking lover, her tresses streaming over him like poisonous tendrils. In another
major painting, his 1894 Ashes, a woman reminiscent of Millie confronts the viewer, her white
dress unbuttoned to reveal a red slip, her hands raised to the sides of her head while a
distraught lover holds his head in despair.

Munch was in Paris in November 1889 when a friend delivered a letter to him. Verifying that it
contained bad news, he bid the friend farewell and went alone to a nearby restaurant, deserted
except for a couple of waiters, where he read that his father had died of a stroke. Although their
relationship had been fraught - "He didn't understand my needs; I didn't understand the things
he prized most highly," Munch once observed - the death unhinged him. Now head of a
financially pressed family, he was sobered by the responsibility and gripped by remorse that he
had not been with his father when he died. Because of this absence, he could not release his
feelings of grief into a painting of the death scene, as he had done when his mother and his
sister Sophie died. Night in Saint Cloud (painted in 1890), a moody, blue interior of his suburban
Paris apartment, captures his state of mind. In it, a shadowy figure in a top hat - his roommate,
Danish poet Emanuel Goldstein - stares out a window at the bright lights on the Seine River.
Evening light, streaming through a mullioned window, casts a symbolic pattern of a cross onto
the floor, evoking the spirit of his devout father.

Following his father's death, Munch embarked on the most productive - if most troubled - stage
of his life. Dividing his time between Paris and Berlin, he undertook a series of paintings that he
called The Frieze of Life. He produced 22 works as part of the series for a 1902 exhibition of the
frieze in Berlin. Suggestive of his state of mind, the paintings bore such titles
as Melancholy, Jealousy, Despair, Anxiety, Death in the Sickroom and The Scream, which he
painted in 1893. His style varies dramatically during this period, depending on the emotion he
was trying to communicate in a particular painting. He turned to an Art Nouveau sultriness
for Madonna (1894-95) and a stylized, psychologically laden Symbolism for Summer Night's
Dream (1893). In his superb Self-portrait with Cigarette of 1895, painted while he was feverishly
engaged with The Frieze of Life, he employed the flickering brushwork of Whistler, scraping and
rubbing at the suit jacket so that his body appears as evanescent as the smoke that trails from
the cigarette he holds smoldering near his heart. In Death in the Sickroom, a moving evocation
of Sophie's death painted in 1893, he adopted the bold graphic outlines of van
Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. In it, he and his sisters loom in the foreground, while his
aunt and praying father attend to the dying girl, who is obscured by her chair. Across the vast
space that divides the living siblings (portrayed as adults) from their dying sister, the viewer's
eye is drawn to the vacated bed and useless medicines in the rear.

In 1898, on a visit to Kristiania, Munch had met the woman who would become his cruel muse.
Tulla Larsen was the wealthy daughter of Kristiania's leading wine merchant, and at 29, she
was still unmarried. Munch's biographers have relied on his sometimes conflicting and far from
disinterested accounts to reconstruct the tormented relationship. He first set eyes on Larsen
when she arrived at his studio in the company of an artist with whom he shared the space. From
the outset, she pursued him aggressively. In his telling, their affair began almost against his will.
He fled - to Berlin, then on a yearlong dash across Europe. She followed. He would refuse to
see her, then succumb. He memorialized their relationship in The Dance of Life of 1899-1900,
set on midsummer's night in Aasgaardstrand, the seaside village where he once trysted with
Millie Thaulow and where, in 1897, he had purchased a tiny cottage. At the center of the picture,
a vacant-eyed male character, representing Munch himself, dances with a woman in a red dress
(probably Millie). Their eyes do not meet, and their stiff bodies maintain an unhappy distance.
To the left, Larsen can be seen, golden-haired and smiling benevolently, in a white dress; on the
right, she appears again, this time frowning in a black dress, her countenance as dark as the
garment she wears, her eyes downcast in bleak disappointment. On a green lawn, other
couples dance lustfully in what Munch had called that "deranged dance of life" - a dance he
dared not join.

Larsen longed for Munch to marry her. His Aasgaardstrand cottage, which is now a house
museum, contains the antique wedding chest, made for a bride's trousseau, that she gave him.
Though he wrote that the touch of her "narrow, clammy lips" felt like the kiss of a corpse, he
yielded to her imprecations and even went so far as to make a grudging proposal. "In my misery
I think you would at least be happier if we were married," he wrote to her. Then, when she came
to Germany to present him with the necessary papers, he lost them. She insisted that they
travel to Nice, as France did not require these documents. Once there, he escaped over the
border to Italy and eventually to Berlin in 1902 to stage The Frieze of Life exhibition.

That summer, Munch returned to his cottage in Aasgaardstrand. He sought peace, but drinking
heavily and brawling publicly, he failed to find it. Then after more than a year's absence, Larsen
reappeared. He ignored her overtures, until her friends informed him that she was in a suicidal
depression and taking large doses of morphine. He reluctantly agreed to see her. There was a
quarrel, and somehow - the full story is unknown - he shot himself with a revolver, losing part of
a finger on his left hand and also inflicting on himself a less obvious psychological injury. Prone
to exaggerated feelings of persecution - in his painting Golgotha of 1900, for instance, he
depicted himself nailed to a cross - Munch magnified the fiasco in his mind, until it assumed an
epic scale. Describing himself in the third person, he wrote, "Everybody stared at him, at his
deformed hand. He noticed that those he shared a table with were disgusted by the sight of his
monstrosity." His anger intensified when Larsen, a short time later, married another artist. "I had
sacrificed myself needlessly for a whore," he wrote.

In the next few years, his drinking, which had long been excessive, grew uncontrollable. "The
rages were coming more and more often now," he wrote in his journal. "The drink was meant to
calm them, especially in the morning but as the day wore on I became nervy, angry." Anguished
as he was, he still managed to produce some of his finest work, including a tableau (executed in
several versions) in which he uses himself as the model for the slain French revolutionary
Marat, and Larsen is cast as Marat's assassin, the grim, implacable Charlotte Corday. His 1906
Self-portrait with a Bottle of Wine, in which he paints himself alone at a restaurant table, with
only a plate, a wine bottle and a glass, testifies to intense disquiet. Two waiters stand behind
him in the almost empty restaurant, evoking the setting in which he had read of his father's
death.

In the fall of 1908, Munch collapsed in Copenhagen. Hearing hallucinatory voices and suffering
paralysis on his left side, he was persuaded by his old roommate from the Saint-Cloud
apartment, Emanuel Goldstein, to check himself into a private sanitarium on the outskirts of the
city. There he reduced his drinking and regained some mental stability. In May, he departed,
vigorous and eager to get back to his easel. Almost half of his life remained. Yet most art
historians would agree that the great preponderance of his best work was created before 1909.
His late years would be less tumultuous, but at a price of personal isolation. Reflecting this view,
MoMA devotes less than a fifth of the show to his post-1909 output. "In his later years," explains
curator McShine, "there are not as many poignant paintings as there were when he was
involved with life."

In 1909, Munch returned to Norway, where he began work on an important series of murals for
the assembly hall at Oslo University. Still in place, the Aula Decorations, as the murals are
known, signaled Munch's new determination to look on the bright side, in this case quite literally,
with a centerpiece of a dazzling sun. In newly independent Norway, Munch was hailed as the
national artist, much as the then recently deceased Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Grieg served,
respectively, as national writer and composer. Along with his new fame came wealth, but not
serenity. Maintaining his distance from an alternately adoring and scornful public, Munch
withdrew to Ekely, an 11-acre estate on the outskirts of Oslo that he purchased in 1916 for a
sum equivalent to the price of two or three of his paintings. He sometimes defended his isolation
as necessary to produce his work. At other times, he implied it was needed to maintain his
sanity. "The second half of my life has been a battle just to keep myself upright," he wrote in the
early 1920s.

At Ekely, Munch took up landscape painting, depicting the countryside and farm life around him,
at first with joyous color, later in bleaker tones. He also returned to favorite images, producing
new renditions of some of The Frieze of Life paintings. In his later years, Munch supported his
surviving family members financially and communicated with them by mail, but chose not to visit
them. He spent much of his time in solitude, documenting the afflictions and indignities of his
advancing years. When he was stricken with a nearly fatal influenza in the great pandemic of
1918-19, he recorded his gaunt, bearded figure in a series of self-portraits as soon as he could
pick up a brush. In 1930, after a blood vessel burst in his right eye and impaired his vision, he
painted, in such works as Self-portrait During the Eye Disease, the clot as it appeared to him - a
large, irregular purple sphere. Sometimes he gave the sphere a head and sharp beak, like a
demonic bird of prey. Eventually, it flew off; his vision returned to normal.

In Self-portrait Between the Clock and the Bed, which dates from 1940-42, not long before
Munch's death, we can see what had become of the man who, as he wrote, hung back from
"the dance of life." Looking stiff and physically awkward, he stands wedged between a
grandfather clock and a bed, as if apologizing for taking up so much space. On a wall behind
him, his "children" are arrayed, one above the other. Like a devoted parent, he sacrificed
everything for them.

Referenced in everything from Home Alone to the horror

movie Scream and the source of countless parodies, Edvard Munch's
painting The Scream (1893) is one of the most famous paintings of all time.
Sometimes also referred to as The Cry, Munch's painting The Scream is
known for its expressionistic colors, bright swirling sky, and of course its
mysterious subject: a person clasping their face, screaming in anguish
alone on a dock. Why is the person screaming? What is the meaning of the
painting The Screamby Edvard Munch?

Art History Behind Edvard Munch's Expressionist Painting The Scream (1893)
The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) was
painted at the end of the nineteenth century during a unique transitional
period in art history, sometimes referred to as the fin de siecle. While
artists were once interested in painting their subjects objectively since their
success was often measured by their technical skill, by the end of the
nineteenth century brave artists like Edvard Munch were starting to use art
to express inner thoughts, feelings and emotions instead, often by painting
with bright, exaggerated colors and simple shapes. Though reviled by art
critics and considered too radical in their time, artists like Munch and even
Vincent Van Gogh paved the way for Expressionism and the even more
progressive modern art movements of the twentieth century.

The Scream by Edvard Munch: Modern Art Analysis

So what is the meaning and story behind The Scream? In what he referred
to as his "soul painting," Edvard Munch reveals an honest and perhaps
even ugly glimpse of his inner troubles and feelings of anxiety, putting
more importance on personal meaning than on technical skill or "beauty," a
traditional goal of art. According to Munch's diaries, the idea and
inspiration for The Scream was very autobiographical, with the modern art
painting's content closely based on a personal experience first recorded in
an 1892 diary entry which Munch later adapted into The Scream painting
and finally, in 1895, a poem.

"I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set;
suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned
against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire
and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went
on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I
heard the enormous infinite scream of nature."
Interpretation of Munch's famous The Scream Painting Quote
What does the famous Edvard Munch quote associated with The
Scream painting mean? In the quote, Munch describes what initially
sounds like a relaxing evening out in Norway, taking a walk at dusk with
some friends beside the fjord. While watching a vivid sunset might sound
relaxing and enjoyable, for Munch it was a moment of existential crisis. In
what sounds like a panic attack, Munch describes feelings of exhaustion
while overwhelmed by an almost violent wave of anxiety. Like most panic
attacks, Munch's experience by the fjord was a lonely internal struggle, as
his two friends walk on without him, completely unaware of the artist's
upset.

Like Van Gogh's Starry Night, the landscape of The Scream painting
almost vibrates with a swirling and overwhelming feeling and emotion. In
the manner of a true Expressionist painter, Munch uses bright colorful
imagery to express his chaotic emotional state in that moment, both in his
poem and in his painting. Munch draws attention to the momentary
intensity of the landscape with brightly saturated, contrasting colors as the
“red― sky ignites above the "bluish black" water. While Munch
mentions feeling "unspeakably tired" in his poem, his painting also
suggests his lightheadedness and helplessness in the situation, with the
person in the foreground seemingly being pulled into the painting's eerily
sentient background.
The Scream Meaning: Where is the scream coming from?
At the end of his poem, Munch mentions hearing "the enormous infinite
scream of nature." In fact, the original German title given by Munch to his
work was Der Schrei der Natur ("The Scream of Nature"). Where does the
"infinite scream of nature" come from? According to his poem, Munch was
psychologically anguished during his experience by the fjord. In the
painting, the subject's mouth and whole face are pulled into the
recognizable shape of a scream, but Munch tells us that he heard the
scream — importantly, he does not say that he himself actually screamed
(at least not out loud). Is this primal scream really coming from the person
in the painting or somewhere else?

The repeated use of the word "blood" in Munch's poem, in combination

with the twirling, swirling, and whirling warm tones used in the background
suggest an external, physical threat. What is the source of violence in this
seemingly isolated landscape in Norway? As it turns out, art history
sources indicate that a slaughterhouse was within earshot of the spot
illustrated in The Scream painting. The proximity of the slaughterhouse
could very well account for Munch's repeated mentions of "blood" in
connection with the painting. The haunting screams of dying animals could
possibly account for the "infinite scream of nature" that Munch heard.

Edvard Munch: Anxiety of the Artist

Was the slaughterhouse the only source of screaming anguish in The
Scream? Like Vincent Van Gogh, throughout his life Edvard Munch
struggled with anxiety and insanity — both on a personal level and
indirectly, through his family. In fact, his mentally ill sister was hospitalized
at the time The Scream was painted in 1893. Along with a slaughterhouse,
the very mental asylum where Munch's own sister was hospitalized was
located very nearby, too. Was the scream Munch heard actually coming
from the insane asylum where his sister was? The true meaning
behind The Scream may very well come back to the decidedly ugly, even
hideous, sounds of living beings undergoing both physical and emotional
suffering in the modern age.

Screaming Man or Woman?

Who is the person in The Scream? In his poem, Munch describes almost
an all-consuming black hole hell where "tongues of fire" savagely lick at the
frazzled and overwhelmed person, unidentifiable as either man or woman.
On first glance, Munch's quote makes it seem that the painting is a self-
portrait of the artist himself. While his experience by the fjord may have
inspired The Scream, the hairless fetal person in The Scream painting is
unrecognizable as either a male or female and has a gaunt, skull-like face.
Due to the ambiguity of the subject's gender, the sexless person dep icted
in the painting may be Munch, or it actually may be Munch's sick sister,
hospitalized in the asylum nearby. In fact, it could be anyone...

The Scream Meaning (1893) by Edvard Munch

What is the meaning of Edvard Munch's 1893 modern art painting The
Scream? When it all comes down to it, a "scream" is above all a sound and
an auditory sensation. The screaming of both the dying animals and the
cries overheard coming from the nearby insane asylum, however faint they
may have been, give an added and potent personal meaning to the
painting's simple title. Did Munch hear a scream that was in fact a mixture
of While the painting may have autobiographical and personal significance
for Munch, one reason why The Scream painting is still so famous even
today is because it is so universal in its meaning. Anyone can look at The
Scream and feel something.

Beneath a boiling sky, aflame with

yellow, orange and red, an androgynous
figure stands upon a bridge. Wearing a
sinuous blue coat, which appears to flow,
surreally, into a torrent of aqua, indigo
and ultramarine behind him, he holds up
 two elongated hands on either side of his
hairless, skull-like head.

His eyes wide with shock, he unleashes

a bloodcurdling shriek. Despite distant
vestiges of normality – two figures upon
the bridge, a boat on the fjord –
everything is suffused with a sense of
primal, overwhelming horror.

This, of course, is The Scream, by the

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch – the
second most famous image in art history,
after Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
Everything is suffused with a sense of primal,
overwhelming horror

Or, to be precise, it is one of four

versions of The Scream that Munch
created in his lifetime. The earliest
painted version, from 1893, is in Oslo’s
National Gallery. Elsewhere in the city,
the Munch Museum boasts the other
painted version, from 1910, as well as a
rendition in pastel from 1893.
 But the version I am describing, a pastel-
on-board from 1895, still in its original
frame, is the only one of the four that
remains in private hands. In 2012, it
briefly set the record for the most
expensive artwork ever to sell at auction,
when, after 12 minutes of bidding, it
fetched almost $120 million (£75 million)
at Sotheby’s in New York. The buyer was
the American financier Leon Black, who
has now lent the work to a new
exhibition, Munch and Expressionism,
at the Neue Galerie in New York.

In 2012 the 1895 pastel-on-cardboard version fetched almost $120 million (£75 million) at
Sotheby’s in New York (Credit: The Scream 1895/Edvard Munch)
“The most prized version is the oil
painting in the National Gallery in Oslo,”
says the art historian Jill Lloyd, who has
curated the exhibition. “But the pastel
version is incredible, because the colour
is so vivid, so fresh, it’s like it was made
yesterday. In my mind, it is the most
intense version: because pastel is such a
free medium, you can see Munch altering
lines and changing contours. So it has
this unbelievably charged, vital surface,
which you don’t really get in the oil
paintings in the same way.”

Existential angst

The exhibition at the Neue Galerie

explores the relationship between
Munch, who was born the second of five
children to an impoverished military
doctor in 1863, and the avant-garde
Expressionist art movement that
emerged in Germany and Austria in the
early years of the 20th Century. Although
the show concentrates on the latter
stages of the artist’s career (Munch died
in 1944), it still finds room for The
Scream of 1895, which he created three
years after first arriving in Berlin, where
he quickly made a notorious name for
himself.

It was in Germany, during several

creatively frenzied years, while
fraternising with like-minded artists and
writers, such as his close friend August
Strindberg, at a bar called the Black
Piglet, that Munch created the major
paintings which remain his best-known
works, including The Vampire and
Madonna. They were conceived for his
epic, semi-autobiographical series The
Frieze of Life, which transmuted his own
high-keyed emotions concerning love,
sexuality and death into universal
symbols. The original, 1893 version of
The Scream was one of 22 elements in
the cycle.
It was in Germany that Munch created the major paintings which remain his best-known
works, including The Vampire and Madonna (Credit: Vampire 1895/Edvard Munch)

In 1892, Munch painted a precursor of

The Scream called Sick Mood at Sunset,
Despair. The composition – bloody sky,
bridge with three figures, bluey-green
lake and landscape – is strikingly similar,
but the style, though relatively radical for
the time, didn’t assault tradition in the
manner of The Scream. The latter
painting was Munch’s breakthrough, as
ferocious existential anguish
overwhelmed the earlier mood of polite
melancholy.
 An entry in Munch’s diary, dated 22
January 1892, recorded the inspiration
for The Scream: “I was walking along the
road with two friends – the sun went
down – I felt a gust of melancholy –
suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I
stopped, leaned against the railing, tired
to death – as the flaming skies hung like
blood and sword over the blue-black fjord
and the city – my friends went on – I
stood there trembling with anxiety – and I
felt a vast infinite scream through
nature.”

It has been suggested that The Scream is a self-portrait, or that inspiration came from a
Peruvian mummy that Munch saw at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889 (Credit: Edvard
Munch)
The figure in The Scream, then, may be
a kind of self-portrait of the artist, whose
older sister, Sophie, had died when he
was 13. Art historians have also
suggested another source for it – a
Peruvian mummy that Munch saw at the
World’s Fair in Paris in 1889.

At the Neue Galerie, The Scream is the

final image that visitors encounter in the
exhibition, because, as Lloyd says,
“Everything about it is the essence of
Expressionism.”

We all scream

Of course, from an art-historical

perspective, Lloyd is correct. Within the
exhibition, a glowering woodcut from
1917 by the German artist Erich Heckel
makes plain the Expressionist debt to
Munch: Heckel’s composition, in which a
man holds his temples while standing in
a forbidding wasteland that seems to
explode into shards of light, is obviously
indebted to Munch’s black-and-white
 1895 lithograph of The Scream. In the
early 20th Century, this print was the
most widely circulated version of
Munch’s picture.

Yet it wasn’t only the Expressionists who

were influenced by Munch. The Scream
was the ancestor of Francis Bacon’s
pictures of howling popes. In 1984, Andy
Warhol made a series of screen-prints
that recast The Scream in bright, eye-
popping colours.

The Scream was the ancestor of Francis Bacon’s pictures of howling popes, including the
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 (Credit: Francis Bacon)
 The Scream also happens to be Tracey
Emin’s favourite “historical” painting: in
1998, she even made a film in which she
visited a Norwegian fjord and hollered for
a full minute, while the camera lingered
on the water. The charismatic Serbian
performance artist Marina Abramovic
persuaded inhabitants of Oslo to scream
in public as a tribute to Munch. Echo
Lake (1998), a sinister painting by the
British artist Peter Doig, features a
spectral policeman clutching his head in
the manner of Munch’s Scream.
Arguably the most stunning thing about The Scream is the
way it transcended art history to become a touchstone of
popular culture

Arguably, though, the most stunning

thing about The Scream isn’t its impact
upon subsequent art, but the way it
transcended art history to become a
touchstone of popular culture. The
Scream has been ripped off, caricatured
and lampooned so often that it is now far
more famous, in its own right, than its
creator.
 People who have never heard of Munch
still recognise The Scream, thanks to the
innumerable references that have been
made to it, in everything from The
Simpsons to Wes Craven’s slasher
franchise Scream, with its ‘Ghostface’
mask, inspired by Munch’s painting, worn
by the killers. The thefts from museums
in Oslo of different versions of The
Scream – one in 1994, the other a
decade later – only enhanced the
image’s notoriety.

The painting appears in pop culture everywhere from The Simpsons to ‘90s slasher
franchise Scream, with its Ghostface mask worn by the killers (Credit: Dimension Films)
In part, says Lloyd, the ubiquity of The
Scream is a result of the fact that “it’s
easy to make into a caricature – and that
is not the case with many paintings. As
an image, it is pared down to the
essence, which means that once you’ve
seen it, you don’t forget it: it’s very easy
to understand as a visual idea. And, of
course, by now, it has been everywhere:
on handbags, posters, mugs, God knows
what.”

At the same time, it is hard fully to

explain its universal appeal. For Lloyd, it
was successful, as an image, because it
articulated an important shift that
occurred within Western culture around
the turn of the 20th Century. “The
Scream is one of those images that sums
up a changing point in history,” she
explains. “It presents man cut loose from
all the certainties that had comforted him
up until that point in the 19th Century:
there is no God now, no tradition, no
habits or customs – just poor man in a
moment of existential crisis, facing a
 universe he doesn’t understand and can
only relate to in a feeling of panic.”

She adds: “That may sound very

negative, but that is the modern state.
This is what distinguishes modern man
from post-Renaissance history up until
that moment: this feeling that we have
lost all the anchors that bind us to the
world.”

At Eternity’s Gate tells the story of Vincent van Gogh’s final years in the
south of France leading up to his death. While based on known details of the
artist’s biography, director Julian Schnabel filled in the details to draw an
even richer portrait of the artist’s life. As TIME movie critic Stephanie
Zacharek puts it: “Schnabel riffs on what we know and speculates about
much we don’t, imagining what it was like to see through Van Gogh’s eyes
and to live in his skin.”

The film is more “impressionist portrait,” as star Willem Dafoe described it,
than straight-up biopic. In January 2019, Dafoe was nominated for an Oscar
for Best Actor for his performance. Here’s what’s true and what’s fiction
in At Eternity’s Gate.
Van Gogh was much younger than Dafoe

At Eternity’s Gate presents a Van Gogh who was much older than the real
artist. Dafoe, who portrays him in the film, is 63 years old. Van Gogh
however, died at 37.

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Although Van Gogh was financially reliant on his brother Theo, he

did make some money selling his own work

Theo van Gogh was an incredibly important figure to his older brother,
providing a great deal of emotional and financial support to Vincent, giving
him a weekly envelope of money and acting as his art dealer. However, the
myth that Van Gogh only ever sold one painting in his lifetime isn’t true.
While his art didn’t equip him with the resources to be financially
independent, he did sell work here and there throughout his life. According
to the Van Gogh Museum, the exact number of work Van Gogh sold is not
known—but between a paintings, commissions and drawings: “It was more
than a couple.”

The depiction of Van Gogh’s mental illness and hospitalization

was accurate
There remains no consensus as to what illness Van Gogh suffered from, but
as depicted in the film, his mental state greatly deteriorated during his time
in Arles. Beginning with the infamous incident in which he cut off one of his
ears, triggered by a row with Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh was prone to periodic
breakdowns, during which he would dissociate from reality. At Eternity’s
Gatesticks true to the details regarding his continued hospitalization during
the last years of his life.

Van Gogh wasn’t quite as much of an outcast as he is in the film

The film focuses closely on the negative responses to Van Gogh’s work, and
how the people surrounding him didn’t understand him. In truth, Van Gogh
was far from an outcast in Parisian art circles, and kept up vigorous
correspondence with several of his peers throughout his time in Arles. Other
than Gauguin, Van Gogh was close with Paul Signac and Emile Bernard,
among others. He also received more than one favorable review in his
lifetime, and had several works shown at a prestigious salons in Paris and
Brussels.

By accounts, Van Gogh shot himself, and was not murdered by

two boys

The most apocryphal detail in the movie surrounds the circumstances of

Van Gogh’s death. The movie portrays that he was hit by a stray bullet f ired
by two young boys playing with a gun. To historical scholars, the accepted
consensus is that Van Gogh shot himself in the chest. Since nobody
witnessed the act, this outcome could certainly be in the realm of
possibility, but as it stands, Van Gogh’s suicide has been met with little
skepticism.
Displaying mental distress with insane feelings of the sorrow, the picture describes an old man crying over for
unknown reasons. He is stressed out and looks unable to bear any more stress as he is trying to hide from the
tensed world by concealing his eyes behind his fists. The support by the elbow represents his weakness and
inability to cope more with the undesired situations. The strongly closed fist may represent the anger inside
him which has aroused after many years of anxiety and strain as those are the essential factors for anger. The
flames in the fireplace at backdrop may represent the fiery agony by which the old man is suffering and has
become an infinite struggle.
Van Gogh firstly made draft of this portrayal in 1882 while researching on the prisoners and war veteran in
The Hague. But it was just a simple outline. In 1890, two months before his death, he recalled his idea due to
the shortage of new inspirations in the four walls of Saint Remy’s Asylum. The reason of recalling this
particular idea could be his worsening mental condition which, allegedly, made him shoot himself in
a wheat field.
The given title to the painting is a perfect fit for the picture as the old man is sorrowing for his misery. While
the second half of the title suggests the next big step of any elderly person’s life – death. Here the title talks
about the age which could be called as the being at the gate of eternity, the life after death. So, we could say
that apart from the unknown misery, the old man is also sorrowing because the end of his life is very near and
he will have to confront whatever will be there in the life after grave.

The grief and the pain he experienced throughout his lifetime in his mind are vividly reflecting in the current
picture. Well, it’s very interesting observation that the painting which he made watching a war prisoner or
veteran sorrowing for his losses, turned out the reflection of his own life, if we think in that way.

Other similar gloomy paintings by Vincent van Gogh are The Night Cafe and Portrait of Dr Gachet, which
were produced during his last years. These sad pictures are the projection of the artist’s unfortunate life and
depressing emotions he suffered for years, which led him to a mental hospital first and then to kill himself.
Though, the emotions he portrayed on this and other canvases are Most Expensive Paintings by Vincent Van
Gogh.

At Eternity's Gate is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh that he made in 1890 in Saint-
Rémy de Provence based on an early lithograph. The painting was completed in early
May at a time when he was convalescing from a severe relapse in his health and some
two months before his death, generally accepted as a suicide.

The lithograph was based on a pencil drawing Worn Out, one of a series of studies he
made in 1882 of a pensioner and war veteran, Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland, at a local
almshouse in The Hague and itself a reworking of a drawing and watercolor he had made
the previous year. The inspiration for Worn Out was Hubert von Herkomer's Sunday at
the Chelsea Hospital, an immensely popular print depicting an old war veteran slumped
dead that went on to become an acclaimed painting at the Royal Academy, The Last
Muster, that van Gogh had seen in 1875 when in England. Van Gogh wrote of his drawing:
Today and yesterday I drew two figures of an old man with his elbows on his knees and
his head in his hands. I did it of Schuitemaker once and always kept the drawing,
because I wanted to do it better another time. Perhaps I'll also do a lithograph of it.
What a fine sight an old working man makes, in his patched bombazine suit with his
bald head. ”
Van Gogh's first attempt at the lithograph followed just two days later. He wrote:
It seems to me that a painter has a duty to try to put an idea into his work. I was trying to
say this in this print - but I can't say it as beautifully, as strikingly as reality, of which this
is only a dim reflection seen in a dark mirror - that it seems to me that one of the
strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of 'something on high' in which Millet
believed, namely in the existence of a God and an eternity, is the unutterably moving
quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that, without his being
aware of it perhaps, as he sits so quietly in the corner of his hearth. At the same time
something precious, something noble, that can't be meant for the worms. ... This is far
from all theology - simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner
can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that
he is close to. ”
Later, in a rare expression of his own religious feelings, he wrote expressly about this
lithograph and two other drawings also posed by Zuyderland, of an old man reading a
Bible and saying grace (below) respectively:
My intention with these two and with the first old man is one and the same, namely to
express the special mood of Christmas and New Year. ... Leaving aside whether or not
one agrees with the form, it's something one respects if it's sincere, and for my part I
can fully share in it and even feel a need for it, at least in the sense that, just as much
as an old man of that kind, I have a feeling of belief in something on high even if I don't
know exactly who or what will be there.”