Day 35 - Who is screaming?

Edvard Munch, 1893, The Scream, oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard, 91 x 73 cm, National Gallery of Norway

Read Psalm 42: 5-11

I recently visited Oslo and the city’s most famous son is the artist Edvard Munch. Munch’s best-known painting is ‘The Scream’. It has been parodied a thousand times; it’s an emoji and a Halloween mask. The image has become so familiar that we don’t appreciate the image anymore. What people don’t realise is that there is more than one. While I was in Oslo I saw four different versions. There are many screams.

It’s a mix between the actual and physical and a swirling, strange world. The laws of perspective are still in play. Look at the pier and the two figures walking behind and yet, the sky is like liquid lava and the central character almost twists into it. The figure is androgynous - he/she has no hair or identifying clothing. The central figure could be any one of us.

Munch describes his walk along the Oslo Fjord; “I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired, and I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue–black fjord and the city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.”

Was the scream his or was it someone else? Certainly Munch was frustrated with the very conservative art of Norway at the time. He was sick of painting knitting and men reading. He wanted to show something of the interior of the soul. Munch had known great despair. He had read Soren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety which said that freedom far from being exciting is scary. If you have freedom of choice - what if you make the wrong choice? Freedom carries with it a burden of responsibility. He illustrates the anxiety of the modern, consumerist world. There are many screams.

What of that amazing blood-red sky? Some scholars think that it is based on reality and that Northern Europe experienced bright sunsets due to pollutants from the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The environment itself is screaming. We can think of ‘creation groaning in travail’ (Romans 8:22) and the damage that we are causing to our environment. There are many screams.

The thing about the painting is that we can’t actually hear the scream or where it comes from. It is all visual. Do we hear the screams of our environment or culture? Do we hear the screams of others or indeed ourselves? Might they teach us something and lead us, like the Psalmist, towards God.

Suzanne Nockels