"The Scream" by Munch. About the most emotional picture in the world

Everyone knows the "Scream" by Edvard Munch (1863-1944). His influence on modern mass art is too significant. And, in particular, the cinema.

Suffice it to recall the cover of the Home Alone video cassette or the masked killer from the horror film Scream of the same name. The image of a creature scared to death is very recognizable.

What is the reason for such popularity of the picture? How did an image from the XNUMXth century manage to "sneak" into the XNUMXth and even the XNUMXst century? Let's try to figure it out.

What is so striking about the picture "Scream"

The picture "Scream" fascinates the modern viewer. Imagine what it was like for the public of the XNUMXth century! Of course, she was treated very critically. The red sky of the painting was compared with the interior of a slaughterhouse.

Nothing surprising. The picture is extremely expressive. It appeals to the deepest human emotions. Awakens the fear of loneliness and death.

And this was at a time when William Bouguereau was popular, who also sought to appeal to emotions. But even in scary scenes, he portrayed his heroes as divinely ideal. Even if it was about sinners in hell.

In Munch's picture, absolutely everything went against accepted norms. Deformed space. Sticky, melting. Not a single straight line, except for the railing of the bridge.

And the main character is an unimaginably strange creature. Similar to an alien. True, in the XNUMXth century, aliens were not yet heard of. This creature, like the space around it, loses its shape: it melts like a candle.

As if the world and its hero were submerged in water. After all, when we look at a person under water, his image is also wavy. And different parts of the bodies are narrowed or stretched.

Note that the head of a walking person in the distance has narrowed so much that it has almost disappeared.

And a cry tries to break through this body of water. But it is barely audible, like ringing in the ears. So, in a dream we sometimes want to shout, but something absurd turns out. The effort outweighs the result many times over.

Only the railings seem real. Only they keep us from falling into the whirlpool sucking into oblivion.

Yes, there is something to be confused about. And once you see a picture, you will never forget it.

The history of the creation of "Scream"

Munch himself told about how the idea to create "The Scream" came about, creating a copy of his masterpiece a year after the original.

This time he placed the work in a simple frame. And under it he nailed a sign, on which he wrote, under what circumstances there was a need to create the "Scream".

It turns out that once he was walking with friends on a bridge near a fjord. And suddenly the sky turned red. The artist was dumbfounded with fear. His friends moved on. And he felt unbearable despair from what he saw. He wanted to scream...

This is his sudden state against the background of the reddened sky, he decided to portray. True, at first he got such a job.

In the painting “Despair”, Munch depicted himself on the bridge at the moment of surging unpleasant emotions.

And only a few months later he changed his character. Here is one of the sketches for the painting.

But the image was clearly intrusive. However, Munch was inclined to repeat the same stories over and over again. And almost 20 years later, he created another Scream.

In my opinion, this picture is more decorative. It no longer has that nagging horror. Defiantly green face emphasizes that something bad is happening to the main character. And the sky is more like a rainbow with positive colors.

So what kind of phenomenon did Munch observe? Or was the red sky a figment of his imagination?

I am more inclined to the version that the artist observed a rare phenomenon of mother-of-pearl clouds. They occur at low temperatures near the mountains. Then ice crystals at high altitude begin to refract the light of the sun that has set below the horizon.

So the clouds are painted in pink, red, yellow shades. In Norway, there are conditions for such a phenomenon. It is possible that it was his Munch who saw.

Is The Scream typical of Munch?

"The Scream" is not the only picture that frightens the viewer. Still, Munch was a man prone to melancholy and even depression. So there are a lot of vampires and killers in his creative collection.

Left: Vampire. 1893 Munch Museum in Oslo. Right: Killer. 1910 Ibid.

The image of a character with a skeletal head was also not new to Munch. He had already painted the same faces with simplified features. The year before, they appeared in the painting "Evening on Karl John Street".

In general, Munch deliberately did not draw faces and hands. He believed that any work must be viewed from a distance in order to perceive it as a whole. And in this case, it does not matter whether the nails on the hands are drawn.

The theme of the bridge was very close to Munch. He created countless works with girls on the bridge. One of them is kept in Moscow, in the Pushkin Museum.

So we find echoes of "The Scream" in many of Munch's works. If you look closely at them.

To sum it up: why Scream is a masterpiece

The Scream is, of course, phenomenal. After all, the artist used very stingy means. The simplest color combinations. Lots and lots of lines. Primitive landscape. Simplified figures.

And all this together in an incredible way expresses the deepest human emotions. Fear and despair. An oppressive feeling of loneliness. Painful foreboding of impending disaster. Feeling of own powerlessness.

These emotions can be felt so piercingly that it is not surprising that the picture was endowed with mystical properties. Allegedly, anyone who touches it is in mortal danger.

But we will not believe in mysticism. But we just admit that "The Scream" is a real masterpiece.

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