The Face That Launched a Thousand Therapists

The art world was buzzing last week that a version of one of the most iconic images in the history of art sold at auction for almost $120 million, the highest price ever reached for an artwork at auction. And that work, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, is the universally recognized symbol of anxiety of all kinds in our modern age.

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 in a farmhouse north of Oslo (then Kristiana). His mother died when he was five, at fourteen, his favorite sister, Sophie died and twelve years later, he lost his father to a stroke. He would write of his father, “From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.”  Another of his other sisters was diagnosed with mental illness from an early age.

Not long after his father died and while spending time between Paris and Berlin he began work on a series of twenty-two paintings called the Frieze of Life with titles such as Melancholy, Jealousy, Anxiety and The Scream. When the frieze was shown in Berlin in 1902 he was recognized as a significant artist and his work became collectible.

In 1908 he was hearing hallucinatory voices and suffering from paralysis on his left side and checked himself into a sanatorium in Copenhagen. Later in Norway he would be honored for his art on a national level, but would end up living in isolation in his final decades.

In the 1930s the Nazis labeled Munch’s work “degenerate art”, along with Picasso, Matisse, Gaugin and Klee. Later, when the Germans invaded Norway during the war Munch feared that his work would be confiscated. Some seventy pieces that had been confiscated by the Nazis had been returned to Norway by purchases of collectors. Munch died before the war ended in 1944 at eighty years old. Some Norwegians wondered if he had been a Nazi sympathizer due to funeral the Germans organized to honor him.

Like the Mona Lisa and American Gothic, and few other images in the history of art, The Scream has become widely recognized in the popular culture. Everyone from Andy Warhol to the Simpson’s have appropriated the image and it is instantly recognizable as a symbol of anxiety, our modern day mental plague.

There are numerous theories about the influences on its creation. One is that the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883 created vivid sunsets even in Norway that might have inspired Munch’s use the neon colors in The Scream’s sky. Another suggests that he might have seen a Peruvian mummy at an exposition that had the same bald head, open mouth and hands pressed against the head as The Scream’s central figure. The video below shows an example.

In the pastel version that was sold earlier this month Munch had painted these words on the frame “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” 

It is something to consider that such a brooding and troubled artist created a silent scream that has resonated with so many for so long.