“O Scream” (1893), by Edvard Munch
Born on December 12, 1863, Edvard Munch lived a life marked by mental health problems and sought to include themes of anxiety and dread in his art.
One of the most iconic compositions in Western art is by Edvard Munch and it’s called The Screamfrom 1893. Under a red sky, on a path with guardrails overlooking a swirling fjord, a sinuous man, all in black, with his hands raised in horror to his bald, skeletal head, screams.
According to , Munch recalled the experience that inspired his painting in his private diaries. “One night I was walking on a mountain path near Kristiania (Old name of Oslo)—with two comrades,” he wrote.
“It was a time when the life had torn my soul. The sun was setting — it had plunged into flames below the horizon… I felt a great scream — and I heard, yes, a great scream.”
The Scream became synonymous with his artist and personal life agitated and anxious. But Munch, born in Løten, Norway, was far more prolific and significant than a single painting, however famous.
“After your death in 1944, aged 80“, he wrote Arthur Lubow“authorities discovered — behind locked doors on the second floor of his home — a collection of 1008 paintings, 4443 drawings e 15,391 engravingsas well as woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks, copper plates and photographs”.
A personal tragedy It drove much of Munch’s prolific artistic output. His mother and older brother both died of tuberculosis when he was still young. Although he enrolled in a technical school in 1879, the difficulties with illness and mental health maintained their irregular attendance.
In his diary, Munch wrote that he was beginning his first painting of an old church in May 1880. In November, he dropped out of technical school and “decided to become a painter“, attending evening courses at the Oslo School of Design.
From an early age, Munch was influenced by Naturalism. But, later, he ended up adopting a more “developed (…) psychologically charged and expressive style to convey emotional sensations”, wrote Lubow, a style that better reflected his personal struggle and that came to define his artistic production.
Em The Sick Child — painted for the first time in 1886, when he was just 23 years old, and revisited in other versions and forms throughout his life — Munch portrays his older sister dying of tuberculosis while your aunt cries beside you.
Death in the Sickroompainted seven years later, shows his family suffering together in a sparse, sickly, orange and green room.
Women occupy a prominent place in much of his work. Some, like Morning e Inger Munch in black, they are aesthetic studies that play with contrast, involving one subject in primitive light and the other in a black dress and background.
However, in many of his paintings of women, Munch explored their relationships and reduced women to the source of his anguish.
The end of his first relationship inspired Vampire (or Love and Pain), a representation full of a kiss on the neck. Woman 1925, also known as Woman in Three Phasesshows desire, detachment and death on the same screen, while a man throbs in pain next to it.
“Munch repeatedly stressed that his pictures fit together ‘like the pages of a diary’”wrote the biographer Sue Prideaux in Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. “All your works are fragments of a great confession“.
His self-portraits — the mysterious and smoky Self-Portrait with a Cigarettefrom 1895, and the tortured Auto-Retrato no Hellfrom 1903, for example — perhaps they best exemplify his deep personal conflict and self-exploration throughout the decades of his career.
Self-portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed is one of his last works, completed in 1943. It shows a Elderly, silent Munch trapped between two symbols of death. Behind him, a room full of his works of art, which he insistently called his “children”.
“Like a devoted father,” Lubow wrote, “sacrificed everything for them“.
Teresa Oliveira Campos, ZAP //
