Edvard Munch - SCREAM

Didn't write anything for a long time, but this will be worth it. I ran into this newspaper article a week ago and I decided to translate it for you, because it is simply great. For the picture and the artist is great. And it is, believe it or not, somehow close to my present state about now..thinking about some very loud scream, that could break the dead-end situation I am..we are..by the way, did you like the film about running and screaming Lola? ;o)

Don't be scared that the article is too long, it is really worth to read it. It is written by PAVEL SAFR and it was published in MF DNES Prague's newspaper on 8th March. I allowed myself to translate it and share it with you.

One version of this painting you might have seen in Munch museum in Oslo, just if the armed robbers didn’t steal it in August 2004, namely in broad daylight. It was just like in a movie. One was holding the museum’s attendant with the gun at her head and the other one took the two paintings – Scream and Madonna. Then they jumped into a car and ran away. Everything took just one minute. Pictures were hanging not far from the museum’s exit door and were not secured. The value of the painting is 450 million norwegian crowns (about 70 million USD).


Version you are able to see now here is held in a National Gallery in Oslo. Together with few more is considered to be main one. As a whole, Edvard Munch made about fifty versions, though. He kept returning to the screaming person theme again and again. The reason is clearly to be found in his inner world, in his thinking about the world and as a reaction on a modern art development.


The art theorists are subsuming Munch to a symbolism. For us is more important, that he was a painter of human soul, of its suffering and crisis. He said himself: “The same as Leonardo was dissecting a human body and corpses, I’m trying to dissect a human soul.”
So there is no surprise, that the newspapers’ reactions on Munch’s first big exhibition in Berlin were derisive. The exhibition was closed, in the end, but Munch set it again by himself.
The posh dandelion in Berlin of William II was loving a romantic landscapes and uncomplicated scenes. Munch’s paintings, whose quick, inflammatory and dark colourness was corresponding with the author’s inner life, surely must have appeared much like a provocation. People in the rolling street crowd have staring eyes. The figures on the painting “Storm” almost tear their hair. Names of another paintings tell their story in themselves: “Sick Child”, “Anxiety”, “By the Death Bed”, “Separation”.


Edvard Munch was born into a family, which was coursed by an usual tragedy of those times. Tuberculosis. When he was five years old , his mother died, than his brother and at the end, even his sorrowful, but deeply believing father, who was working as a doctor of the soldiers and poor people. In addition, Munch had a liquorishness and his nervous crises led him repeatedly into sanatorium. In one of them he was even cured by the electro-shocks. It is said that after that his paintings lost some of his previous sensitive passion.


Neverending Scream
Munch’s output was also influenced by a complicated relation to women. The paintings “Madonna” and “Kiss” are pointing on some sort of fascination by women. Though, it was accompanied by frustrations. Hard times he’s been through mainly during his relationship to a rich businessman’s daughter, Tulla Larsen. Several times they split up and got together again. Tulla was longing for wedding, Munch not as much. In 1902 she attempted to commit suicide and when Munch tried to whip a gun out of her hand, a shot occured and the painter lost a part of his finger.


His perhaps the most famous picture, “Scream” he made in 1893 for the first time. It is said, that he was inspired by a mummy in a museum, which has an open mouth as it was in scream. But it’s not just an open mouth on the painting. It’s a picture of disaffected being closed in his own despair. And the picture of a landscape, that is ruled by a anonymous impersonal energy. The colours of the sky remind the sound waves, like the scream filled the surroundings and moved on. Loneliness is pointed out by two figures behind, that are leaving the scene showing no interest.
Munch himself said about the birth of a Scream: “I went in an alley with my two friends. The sun was setting behind the mountain beneath the city and the fiord – I felt strong impact of sadness – the sky suddenly turned into bloody red. I stopped, proped against the railing, been dead beat – friends just looked back after me and went on – I watched the burning clouds over the fiord. They were like blood and sword – red and blue fiord and the city – my friends were going on and I stood there still and shaking from fear – and felt as though neverending scream.”

Credits: Author>Pavel Safr, MF Dnes, Prague, 8.03.2006