THE SCREAM (Edvard Munch, Norwegian, 1893)
One (presumably cold) January evening in 1893 in Oslo, Norway, artist Edvard Munch was out for a sunset stroll with a couple of friends. Per his own account, as the sky turned blood red, he paused and leaned on a fence. "My friends walked on," he wrote, "and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature..." He made two paintings and two pastels conveying this experience, called Shriek in Norwegian and, true to Munch's impetus, The Scream of Nature in German. The actual face may have been inspired by a mummy he could have seen in Paris in 1889. The Scream is widely seen as symbolizing the anxiety of the human condition.
(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons; CTTO)
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