Art News

 

MoMa Exhibition:

 

Edvard Munch: "The Scream" 

Edvard Munch. The Scream. Pastel on board. 1895. © 2012 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, www.moma.org

Edvard Munch's "The Scream" will be open for the public to see it from October 20, 2012-April 29, 2013.  Munch explained his inspiration behind the image in his diary entry titled "Nice 22 January 1892": "One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream." He turned this thought into a poem that he hand-painted onto the frame of the pastel version of the work in 1895.  "I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – 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 infinite scream passing through nature." (www.wikipedia.org) 

I'm personally excited to see "The Scream", which I will...hopefully and eventually. I think there is no better way to present the "scream" of nature than Munch presented it. But also, to me, the painting always seemed like more psychoanalytical than actually representing only the visuals of a day coming to an end. The man in the painting, which is in this case Munch himself, is a lonely man. He is accompanied by his two friends, but still he is very lonely, and no one really knows how tortured he is. No one knows how much he wants to scream,but instead of doing it, he just paints what he feels. That's how I've always seen it. :)