The Scream

Painted at the close of the 19th century, "The Scream" serves as the birth certificate of modern Expressionism. Munch radically broke with Impressionism to explore the labyrinth of the human soul. The historical context is that of a Europe in flux, where religious certainties were collapsing under the weight of burgeoning psychoanalytic discoveries. Munch did not paint what he saw, but what he felt: a profound solitude within a nature that had turned hostile. The setting is precise—the Oslo Fjord from Ekeberg—but it is transfigured by a subjective vision that turns reality into a chromatic nightmare. While no direct ancient myth is present, the work creates its own "modern myth": that of alienation. Munch described in his diary a quasi-mystical experience where, while walking with friends, he saw the sky turn blood-red and felt an "infinite scream" passing through nature. It is not the figure who screams, but the figure who protects themselves from the scream of the universe. This semantic inversion shifts the subject from the anecdotal to the universal, stripping away hope for divine redemption and leaving man alone before the void. Munch’s technique is deliberately raw and hasty to preserve the immediacy of emotion. He utilized a combination of tempera, oil, and pastel on cardboard, creating matte, dry textures that reinforce the harshness of the message. The sinuous curves of the figure and the landscape contrast sharply with the rigid, straight lines of the bridge, creating an unbearable visual tension. The pigments, particularly the cadmium red and orange-yellow of the sky, are applied with a violence suggesting vital urgency. This economy of means in service of maximum intensity prefigures the artistic revolutions of the 20th century. Psychologically, the work is a self-portrait of depression and agoraphobia. Munch was haunted by illness and death, having lost his mother and sister at a very young age. The central figure, stripped of gender and identity, becomes a vessel for the viewer’s own anxiety. The retreating friends in the background symbolize the severance of social ties and the impotence of human communication. The painting does not merely represent pain; it embodies it through a distortion of space-time where the landscape seems to liquefy under extreme psychic pressure.