In the Scream, a skeleton-like person stuffs up to his ears with his both hands and screams, as if it is a person’s nightmare, horrible and crazy. His sallow, bony face and curved body are devoured by twining lines. Sea, land and sky under the background are all covered by the wavelike, blood-red lines. Everything has been controlled by lines and the person in the painting seems no way out. Colors and lines are so crazy! The bright red and blue in the air, red, yellow, blue and green in the scenery, as well as dynamic caused by colors and lines, trouble everyone. Everything is clouded in a mysterious atmosphere. In this picture with a tense atmosphere, the scream from the bottom of the heart passes through the whole universe. This was the very masterpiece of the famous Norwegian painter Munch in 19th century-Scream, which is the most extreme representation of his idea “painting with his soul“, or straightforwardly, the scream from Munch.
In 1890，he begins to create the most significant collection -”Life“-a suite of paintings. This suite of paintings has extensive subjects and makes the celebration of ”life, love and death” as its basic subject, adopting metaphors and symbols to explore human worry and horror at the end of the century. Created by Munch in 1893, The Scream is the strongest and most exciting one in this suite of paintings and also one of his important masterpieces. In this painting, Munch, in an overstated way, depicts a twisted, screamed human image, in which human extreme loneliness, anguish and terror in front of the immense universe are described most vividly and incisively. Munch himself ever told about the origin of this painting as follows:
One day, I wandered along a road, on the one side of which is a city and on the other is a fjord. It tired and sick, I stopped, looked into the other side of the fjord and found the setting sun with blood-stained clouds around.
I felt a harsh scream penetrating the universe, as if I could hear it. I drew this painting immediately, including the blood-stained clouds. These colors were screaming and this is The Scream in the suite of painting life.
In this painting, there is no any specific image hinting on the horror which causes such a scream. Images in the center of this painting can make your hair on the back rise. He seems to be crossing us and heading toward the railing in the distance. Covering his ears, he can neither hear the footsteps of that two disappearing passerby, nor see the two boats and church steeples in the distance. Otherwise, the whole loneliness may be reduced a bit. Completely isolated from the real world, this lonely person seems to be completely conquered by the extreme terror from the bottom of his heart. This image is highly exaggerated and that deformed, twisted and screamed face is totally comic. The wide-open eyes and sunken cheeks can easily remind you of a skeleton connected with death. This is nothing less than a screamed ghost! “This can only be drawn by the insane,” Munch described in his draft.
In this painting, Munch makes every color have something to do with nature in a certain way. Although blue water, brown earth, green trees and red sky are exaggerated in an expressive way, but they don’t to lose their general truth of these colors. All colors in this painting are gloomy. Strong blood red suspends above the horizon, giving audiences a sense of premonition. It clashes with purple color in the darkness of the sea surface. The purple turns to be cloudier for its extension towards the distance and the same purple repeatedly appears on the loner’s clothes, while his hands and head are left in the pale, dull brownish grey.
In this painting, everything is filled with energy and energy. The curves of sky and water from a striking contrast with the strong and straight oblique lines. In the revolving movement, the whole sketch is full of rough and strong rhythm. All formal components seem to deliver that harsh scream. Maybe this method of visualizing sound can match with visualizing strength and energy in the Starry Night – masterpiece of Van Gogh. Here, Munch transforms the extremely inner anxiety caused by the scream, into the compelling abstract images. In this way, all emotions in the painting have almost been enhanced into a perfect level.
Usually, The Scream is thought as the first formalist painting. The intense colors in the painting flame out audiences’emotions like the fire, developing into Munch’s special painting language. In this painting, anamorphic distorted human image, blood red background, as well as trembling, revolving, and circling lines are like the craziest ideas of a person while this rightly comes from the real inner world of Munch. They reflect Munch’s personal feelings, terrifying components he bears in life, hostility towards this period, and protest against his inner weakness as well as the mechanized heart, expressing his despair and way of escaping. This is not only Munch’s scream, but also a predictive description of human spiritual beliefs in the modern society and a metaphor of the tragedy of human themselves. This is the origin of Munch’s art, because he is destined to pay the deserved price for art.
