The Scream

For other uses, see The Scream (disambiguation).

An agonized figure is depicted against a blood red Oslofjord skyline in Edvard Munch's Scream (1893), National Gallery, Oslo.

Scream (Skrik, 1893) is a seminal series of expressionist paintings by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. It is said by some to symbolize the human species overwhelmed by an attack of existential angst. The landscape in the background is Oslofjord, viewed from the hill of Ekeberg. The Norwegian word skrik is usually translated as "scream", but is cognate with the English shriek. Occasionally, the painting has been called The Cry.

A (66 x 83.5 cm) version of this piece appears in the Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway (see gallery), and an oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard (measuring 91 x 73.5 cm) in the National Gallery of Norway (shown to right). A third version is also owned by the Munch Museum, and a fourth is owned by Norwegian billionaire Petter Olsen. Munch later also translated the picture into a lithograph (see gallery), so the image could be reproduced in reviews all over the world. Since 1994, two separate versions of Scream have been stolen by art thieves, but both were eventually recovered.

Sources of inspiration

The original German title given to the work by Munch was Der Schrei der Natur In a note in his diary - the page headed Nice 22.01.1892, Munch described his inspiration for the image thus:

I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

— Edvard Munch

The reddish sky in the background was possibly inspired by the aftermath of the powerful volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The ash that was ejected from the volcano left the sky tinted red in much of eastern United States and most of Europe and Asia from November, 1883 to February, 1884.

The person in the foreground may be the artist himself, not screaming but protecting himself or itself from the scream of Nature. Thus, the position in which he portrays himself could be considered a reflex reaction typical of anyone struggling to keep out distressing noise, whether actual or imagined. It is possible that intense waves of infrasound produced by Krakatoa's initial blast may have contributed to his overwhelming anxiety and panic, and are thus one of the ultimate sources of inspiration for the painting.

The scene was identified as being the view from a road overlooking Oslo, the Oslofjord and Hovedøya, from the hill of Ekeberg. At the time of painting the work, Munch's manic depressive sister Laura Catherine was interned in the mental hospital at the foot of Ekeberg.

In 1978, the renowned Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested that the strange, sexless creature in the foreground of the painting was probably inspired by a Peruvian mummy, which Munch could have seen at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. This mummy, which was crouching in a fetal position with its hands alongside its face, also struck the imagination of Munch's friend Paul Gauguin: it stood model for the central figure in his painting Human misery (Grape harvest at Arles) and for the old woman at the left in his painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?. More recently, an Italian anthropologist speculated that Munch might have seen a mummy in Florence's Museum of Natural History which bears an even more striking resemblance to the painting.

Thefts

File:Munch Scream Thieves 2004.jpg

Thieves taking paintings from the Munch Museum, August 2004. Photo taken by unidentified bystander.

On February 12, 1994, the same day as the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, four men broke into the National Gallery and stole its version of Scream, leaving a note reading "Thanks for the poor security". The painting had been moved down to a ground floor display as part of the Olympic festivities, and the presence of international media covering the games made the theft a sensation. An early claim of responsibility by a Norwegian anti-abortion group turned out to be false. After the gallery refused a ransom demand of USD $1 million in March 1994, Norwegian police set up a sting operation with assistance from the British Police and the Getty Museum, and the painting was recovered undamaged on May 7 1994. In January 1996, four men were convicted in connection with the theft, including Pål Enger, who in 1988 had been convicted of stealing Munch's Vampire.

On August 22, 2004, masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum during daylight hours and stole two paintings: Scream (a different version than that stolen in 1994), and Munch's Madonna. On April 8, 2005, Norwegian police arrested a suspect in connection with the theft, but the paintings remained missing, and it was rumored that they had been burned by the thieves to destroy evidence. On June 1, 2005, with four suspects already in custody in connection with the crime, the City Government of Oslo offered a reward of 2 million Norwegian kroner (about 250,000 euro) for information that could help locate the paintings. Though the paintings remained at large, six men went on trial in early 2006, variously charged with either assisting to plan or execute the robbery. Three of the men were convicted and sentenced to between four and eight years in prison in May of 2006, and two of the convicted, Bjørn Hoen and Petter Tharaldsen, were also ordered to pay compensation of 750 million kroner (US $122 million) to the City of Oslo. The Munch Museum itself was closed for 10 months for a $6 million security overhaul.

On August 31, 2006, Norwegian police announced that a police operation had recovered both Scream and Madonna, but did not reveal detailed circumstances of the recovery. The paintings were said to be in a better-than-expected condition. "We are 100 percent certain they are the originals," police chief Iver Stensrud told a news conference. "The damage was much less than feared." Munch Museum director Ingebjørg Ydstie confirmed the condition of the paintings, saying it was much better than expected and that the damage could be repaired. The Scream had moisture damage on the lower left corner, while Madonna suffered several tears on the right side of the painting as well as two holes in Madonna's arm.

Before repairs and restoration of the paintings began, they were put on public display by the Munch Museum beginning September 27 2006. During the five-day exhibition, 5500 people viewed the damaged paintings. According to a June 2007 statement released by the museum, the conservation process is still ongoing, and the conserved works are due to be shown in 2008.

Role in popular culture

In the late twentieth century, Scream acquired iconic status in popular culture. In 1983–1984, pop artist Andy Warhol made a series of silk prints of works by Munch, including Scream. The idea was to desacralize the painting by making it into a mass-reproducible object, though Munch had already begun that process himself, by making a lithograph of the work for reproduction. Furthermore, characteristic of post-modern art is Erró's ironic and irreverent treatment of Munch's masterpiece in his acrylic paintings The Second Scream (1967) and Ding Dong (1979).

File:Simpsons the scream.JPG

Scream appears in The Simpsons

The work's reproduction on all kinds of items, from t-shirts to coffee mugs, bears witness to its iconic status as well as to its complete desacralization in the eyes of today's public. In that respect, it is comparable to other iconic works of art, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. An American muralist, Robert Fishbone, discovered a gap in the market when in 1991 he started selling inflatable figures of the central figure in the painting. His St. Louis-based company, On The Wall Productions, has sold hundreds of thousands of them.

File:Animaniacs the scream.jpg

The Scream appearing in an Animaniacs episode.

As one of very few works of modern art that are instantly recognizable to a broad audience, Scream has been used in advertising, in cartoons, in anime, and has likewise fascinated film and television. Ghostface, the psychotic murderer in Wes Craven's Scream horror movies, wears a Halloween mask inspired by the central figure in the painting. Reproductions of this mask are now very popular and common masks in the real world. The work also serves as an item of conversation and an elaborately set-up, momentary sight-gag in the film The Pompatus of Love. It can also be seen in an episode of the BBC drama Jonathan Creek, where it is used as a backdrop to one of Adam Klaus' magic shows. It also appears in some video and computer games, including the last level of the game Altered Beast, where one of the silhouettes in the foreground heavily resembles Scream and in the original System Shock, where it is shown on the executive level as one of the pictures on the wall, heigtening the intense feeling of that game. A digitalized version was used on the front cover of The UNIX-Haters Handbook to emphasize intense frustration. A likeness of the figure in the painting was used as the Ghost in the 1990s toy line, Monster in My Pocket. The painting also appears in a Beavis and Butt-Head episode, Butt is it Art ?. The painting is also mentioned in the show Arthur in the episode "Binky Barnes, Art Expert". In the series finale of the Showtime show Dead Like Me, when a girl by the name of Josie Feldman is murdered by a serial killer on Halloween, he emerges out of Josie's house and blows out a candle in a Jack-o-Lantern with a painting of the painting's head on it instead of the traditional face. In the Doctor Who audio adventure Dust Breeding, the painting is revealed to contain an alien intelligence.

It has also been used in political humor and advertisement. During the first Bush administration a popular poster showed the painting with the caption "President Quayle." In August 2006, Masterfoods USA, the maker of M&M's candies, began using Scream in ads for its dark chocolate variety of candies and offered a reward of two million of the candies for the painting's return. Shortly after the promotion was announced, the painting was recovered. Masterfoods has announced its intention to honor the reward once the recovered painting is authenticated.

Gallery

• 
  Munch translated Scream into lithograph in 1895.
• This version, executed in tempera on cardboard, was stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004, and recovered in 2006.
  This version, executed in tempera on cardboard, was stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004, and recovered in 2006.

External links

• One of the artist's many versions of the painting
• Edvard Munch - Scream
• An Eye on Art: Scream (Bohème, May 2005)
• Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway
• Gallery Munch - Løten, Norway