objections as exactly the kind of “conventional and narrow-minded” thinking he despised.
“My art,” Munch wrote, “is rooted in a single reflection: Why am I not as others are? Why was there a curse on my cradle?” Painting was not merely a career, or even a calling, but a cry from the abyss. “There should be no more paintings of interiors and people reading and women knitting,” Munch declared. “There should be images of living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love—I shall paint a number of such pictures—people will understand the holiness of it, and they will take off their hats as if they were in a church.”
Instead, they took out rotten fruit and hurled it as if they were in a burlesque hall. It was Munch’s raw, unfinished technique, not his subject matter, that inspired such scorn. The contempt directed at Munch echoed the critics’ mockery when, two decades before, the impressionists had mounted their first shows.
“There is not even any proper underpainting in the picture,” one Norwegian critic scolded, when he saw Munch’s Portrait of the Painter Jensen-Hjell. “The colors have been crudely daubed on the canvas; indeed it looks as if it has been painted with the blotches of paint left over on the palette after another picture.” One newspaper reported that visitors emerged from a Munch exhibition asking whether he held the paintbrush with his hands or his feet.
The abuse poured down even on paintings that would later be hailed as among Munch’s greatest. At one show, Munch reported with horror, he approached The Sick Child and found a rowdy crowd “laughing and shouting” in front of the depiction of his sister’s deathbed. Munch rushed outside, where one of his fellow artists, a then acclaimed and now forgotten figure, ran over and shouted in his face: “Humbug painter!” The critics were nearly as contemptuous. “The kindest service one can do for the painter E. Munch,” one wrote, “is to pass over his pictures in silence.”
From the beginning, though, a few viewers did understand what Munch was up to. In 1892, a group called the Association of Berlin Artists put on an exhibition of Munch’s work. The paintings were so controversial that they inspired a virtual civil war between an avant-garde faction of artists, who supported Munch, and a group of more conventional painters, who despised him. After only six days, the artists’ association voted to close the show down. A riot broke out. Munch’s reputation as an emblem of modernity was made.
The Scream appeared the following year. Most viewers hated it. The impression it gave, according to one French newspaper, was that Munch had dipped a finger in excrement and smeared it around.
The painting grew out of an actual experience, though scholars quarreled over its date. Munch had set out for an evening stroll along the water, near Oslo. “I was walking along the road with two friends,” he recalled years afterward. “The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red.”
For years, Munch grappled with the memory of that sunset and labored to capture it in paint. The date of his evening walk has lately stirred a debate—1883 and 1886 and 1891 all have their partisans—because it now seems likely that poor Munch, his nerves already aflame, happened to witness one of the astonishing meteorological sights of all time. At 10:02 in the morning on August 27, 1883, half a world away from Norway, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa erupted. The island vanished from the earth, blasting itself apart into the heavens. Six cubic miles of rock, rendered into pumice and dust, rained down; smaller particles wafted high into the atmosphere. In the months to come, those floating particles drifted around the world and created sunsets that blazed and glowed with colors of an intensity and splendor no one had ever seen. The New York Times reported, on November 28, 1883, that “soon after five o’clock the western horizon suddenly flamed into a brilliant scarlet, which crimsoned sky and clouds. People in the streets were startled at the unwonted sight and gathered in little groups on all the corners to gaze into the west…. The clouds gradually deepened to a bloody red hue, and a sanguinary flush was on the sea.”
More stolid observers than Munch lost their bearings. In Poughkeepsie, New York, a team of firemen harnessed their horses to their pump wagon and raced toward the setting sun to fight the inferno on the horizon. In Oslo, on November 30, 1883, a newspaper reported that “a strong light was seen yesterday and today to the west of the city. People believed it was a fire: but it was actually a red refraction in the hazy atmosphere after sunset.”
Was this the sunset that Munch witnessed? Art historians have always attributed the appearance of the sky in The Scream to the combination of Norway’s vivid sunsets and Munch’s jangled nerves. (Some downplay Munch’s recollection and dismiss the question of literal sunsets altogether.) Now it seems that the detective work of two physicists and a professor of English may change that conventional wisdom.*
The scene impressed Munch so profoundly that he wrote several descriptions of his evening walk. “I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead-tired,” he recalled in 1892. “And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.”
That scream was destined to echo around the world. For Munch, it marked a personal, private terror. “For several years, I was almost mad—at that time the terrifying face of insanity reared up its twisted head,” he wrote later. “You know my picture The Scream. I was being stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood—I was at breaking point.”
Decades later, The Scream would achieve universal fame. No longer seen as an expression of one man’s torment, it was taken instead as a shriek of despair that might have come from almost anyone. Munch had felt panicky and overwhelmed. Half a century later, after the deaths of millions in two world wars and the threatened death, from atomic bombs, of everyone else, those feelings resonated across the globe. Pop trends—the rise of coffee-house existentialism, a taste for European gloom a la Bergman, rumors of the death of God—had made angst and alienation fashionable. In March of 1961, Time magazine hailed the new mood with a cover story entitled “Guilt and Anxiety.” The cover illustration? The Scream.
The Scream was everywhere, reproduced endlessly in posters and also in such austere settings as psychology textbooks. This first round of fame was more or less straightforward, a kind of homage. But paintings and sculptures can become celebrities of a sort, famous for being famous, and when they do, we subject them to the same indignities that we inflict on other stars who have had the presumption to fly too high. We daub a mustache on the Mona Lisa, dress Michelangelo’s David in boxer shorts, transform the heartland figures of Grant Woods’s American Gothic into pitchmen for breakfast cereal.
For Edvard Munch, who was not a wry fellow, the fate of The Scream would have been a joke cruel beyond imagining. He had begun painting in the hope that his audiences would “understand the holiness” of his images. In time, the most famous of those images would adorn key rings and Halloween masks and, in Macaulay Culkin’s version, serve as the emblem for one of Hollywood’s biggest hits. The central figure of The Scream, one art historian proclaims, is now “the counterpart to the familiar smiley face.”
The Scream was intended as one in a sequence of some two dozen paintings called The Frieze of Life. (The count is not exact because Munch worked on the project for more than three decades, and dropped, added, and revised various paintings along the way.) All the paintings dealt in some way with Munch’s favorite topics—sex, death, and alienation—but The Scream stands out from its fellows. In both emotion and technique, it is Munch’s rawest work.
All the other paintings that make up The Frieze of Life are painted in oil on canvas. The Scream combines tempera, in essence poster paint, with pastel and chalk, and is painted not on canvas but on a sheet of ordinary, untreated cardboard. Munch worked and reworked the themes he took up in The Scream—the harrowing red-and-yellow sky and the other landscape features are nearly identical in his 1892 oil painting Despair, for example—but The Scream has an urgency that is almost painful. The famous central figure was sketched so hastily that we can see the cardboard peeking through the face.
For Charley Hill, such details were crucial. Recovering The Scream, if he could
