Norway's most famous writers and artists are two – henrik Ibsen, the father of modern theatre who wrote The Doll's House, and Munch, a painter of a younger generation than him, who painted Scream. In terms of individual works, the popularity and recognition rate of "Scream" in today's day is probably comparable to "Mona Lisa" and "Contemplator".
Sick and sad family
Born on 12 December 1863 in Ådalsbruk, Norway, Edvard Munch moved with his family to Oslo the following year, still known as Christiania.
Munch's art can be said to be the product of his bumpy life experience. His family had hereditary physical and mental illnesses, her sister suffered from mental illness, his dear sister and mother died prematurely, and the only married younger brother in the family died a few months after marriage. Munch's father, a devoutist, obsessively convinced that the family's doom was God's punishment, instilled in Munch the image of angels and hell. Munch's fate made him a child who was attached to painting and did not think about the sadness of reality.
Self-Portrait, 1882
These experiences profoundly influenced Munch's thinking, and he said to himself, "The angel of fear, pain, and death, who has stood by my side since the day I was born." Munch thus developed a sensitive and pessimistic personality. Munch had been unhappy with his father, and after his father's death in 1889, he said, "I live with the dead—my mother, my sister, my grandfather, my father... and that's it all." Why are you still alive?"
Munch in 1902
Against this background, Munch did not intend to depict the so-called objective reality, but rather to draw his own inner world of traumatic experience and pain, based on his personal experience.
From Impressionism to Post-Impressionism
In terms of painting, Munch experienced many attempts and transformations, and one of his important influences came from the rise of Impressionism in France.
Munch first painted "The Sick Child" in 1885 and 1886, depicting johanne Sophie, her sister in a hospital bed, next to her daughter's desperate, helpless and bowed mother. Munch's treatment of the picture in his first version may remind us of the Impressionist master Edgar Degas's L'Absinthe or ballet dancers, but Munch uses brighter colors, and he paints emotionally intense scenes, with an unsettling contrast between the colors.
Later, Munch argued that the Impressionists were still too technical, and that his goal was not to capture moments in the fluid world that impressionists wanted. Munch turned to post-impressionism, which was characterized by the transformation of the world in a subjective state of mind, represented by Van Gogh's flowing lines and Gauguin's unusual colors, as well as the paintings of henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a painter who wandered at the Moulin Rouge in Paris.
Mind painting with sexual themes
Munch had a nihilistic writer friend, Hans Jæger, who was also an anarchist who advocated suicide as the ultimate path to freedom—hence the conservative Munch father's great opposition to his son associating with him. However, it was Jæger who encouraged Munch to try to paint his own emotional and mental states, and he began his "soul painting", the first of which was "Sick Child". Munch later said, "Nature is not everything that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner image of the soul."
We probably all agree that Van Gogh's paintings do not restore the appearance of reality, and he projects subjective feelings on scenes such as cypress trees and starry nights. Munch's paintings have a similar orientation, with most of his works not having a clear thematic nature, but mainly expressing nervous emotions, mental pain and human vulnerability. Thus, Munch's art is also known as expressionism.
Munch painted the Portrait of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
（Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche），1906年
Munch's other theme is sex. He was driven by the bohemian emphasis on sex, which he saw as a channel for liberating people from the normativity of society and Munch's way of exploring the dark psychology of human beings. A representative work in this regard is "Loveing Woman", which has another title, "Madonna". Negatively influenced by his father, Monk rarely painted religious subjects, but if he follows the title of "The Virgin", he is depicting the moment of the Virgin Mary's conception as an expression of orgasm ecstasy.
Monk, Loving Woman/Madonna (1894)
The general anxiety in The Scream
In 1893, Munch painted the first version of The Scream. The German title der Schrei der Natur (Der Scream of Nature) is set in the German title of "The Scream of Nature," which comes from Munch's personal experience, when he was walking on the road in Oslo one day at sunset, when he came to a fjord, he felt tired and unwell, saw the clouds in the sky suddenly stained blood red by the sunset, and claimed to hear "endless cries to penetrate nature".
Munch's portrayal of this experience is very bold and directly reminiscent of Van Gogh's work. There are several lines on the screen: the horizontal lines of the clouds in the sky, the nearly vertical diagonal lines on the bridge and the curved lines on the right that combine the river channel with the vista, and several lines can maintain the composition of the picture while creating tension.
The figure in the middle of the picture holds his head with both hands, his eyes are wide open, and his mouth is open, although he is in the center of the painting, but the painting roughly uses the top-down viewpoint, and the proportion of the characters is not much, so the viewer will feel that the characters are in a distorted and upheaval environment, echoing the violent emotions of the characters.
Munch's 1910 re-painting Of The Scream was stolen but recovered
The general interpretation of the painting "Scream" agrees that the work shows a general anxiety of modern people. It is not a feeling of fear of a particular thing, but a universal condition of human existence, and Munch hopes that the viewer will resonate from the painting. "The Scream" was once rated as a landmark work of modern art, and it was the Mona Lisa of that era.
Looking back at Munch's lifelong re-painting of The Sick Child, comparing the third and fourth editions of 1907 with the older versions, we can clearly see how to move from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism. In one of these versions, we can see Munch's rapid, irregular, and flowing lines, closer to the earlier Scream than earlier versions.
When parody soaked in the meaning of the original
Few people have probably not seen The Scream, and Munch's paintings have been integrated into American-dominated pop culture. In the Scream series, which began in the 1990s, the "ghostface" mask worn by the murderer was inspired by "Scream". Even the popular "Face Screaming in Fear" of the emojis we use every day is a reference to Scream.
The universal postmodern culture allows us to separate from traditional discourse and the context of the work. At this time, we find a rather interesting phenomenon: because we are exposed to the cartoonized "Scream" image every day, these performances affect our perception of this expression, so that we habitually have a funny sense of joy about it; but under the influence of popular culture, it is difficult for us to feel the same as Munch. Without a good understanding of the background of the painting, we no longer feel the emotions expressed in "Na Di", but instead reflexively make comedic feelings about it based on our past experience.
Another work with a similar effect can be found in Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. I wonder what everyone's first impression of this painting is?
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus
Norwegian national artist
Munch's life was not always tragic, and when he was almost alone in art, the local residents of Oslo gradually accepted him and supported him, so that he gradually gained fame and wealth, and was able to exhibit in various art galleries, all of which brought encouragement to Munch. After Munch's death in 1944, more than 20,000 of his works were bequeathed to the city of Oslo, and the municipal government took over the copyright management of the works and established the Munch Museum. If art fans have the opportunity to travel to Norway after the epidemic, they must visit this Norwegian national artist.
Munch Museum in Oslo Tøyen
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