BackViews | The cream of screams
Views | The cream of screams
PremiumA Munch Museum handout of “The Scream,” by Edvard Munch. Photo: Bloomberg.
Late Norwegian painter Edvard Munch’s The Scream is being put up for auction by Sotheby’s in New York on 2 May. There’s already buzz that it could beat the current record for art auction prices of $106 million held by Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, when it was sold at Christie’s at 2010. (Note: This is the auction record, unadjusted for inflation. If inflation is factored in, Portrait of Dr Gachet by Van Gogh (who managed to sell only one painting in his lifetime), which went for $82.2 million in 1990 possibly gets the crown, with a current value for $144 million. Also, when you come to private sales—that is, not through the auction route, then Cezanne’s The Card Players, sold by Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos to the Qatar royal family for an estimated $250 million last year is way ahead of the field.)
Perhaps no. The Scream is one of the most widely recognized works of art of the last 150 years (it was painted originally in 1893, and Munch did three more versions, the last in 1910), ranking with, say, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Picasso’s Guernica and, well, Cezanne’s Card Players. But The Scream has become a part of pop culture unlike any of the others. Do a Google Images search for “munch scream", and among other things, you’ll find a Homer Simpson version, a bottle of Munch’s Screaming Hot Sauce, Scream T-shirts and skirts, take-offs like “the spermatozoid’s scream" and “Munch’s cat’s scream", Scream cellphone skins, wallpapers, a cartoon of Munch’s genderless creature screaming: “Oil at $100 a barrel!"
Inevitably, Andy Warhol has done his own “art" based around the painting. The killer in the wildly successful teen-slasher series Scream wears a facemask and robe inspired by Munch’s figure (As some sort of second-level derivative, the spoof horror series Scary Movie too features the same).
Munch was in a pretty overwrought condition when he conceived of the painting. He had been deeply scarred as a child by his father’s hellfire Christianity—all Satan and hell and sin, lost his mother and a sister by the time he was fourteen, become the groupie of nihilist philosopher Hans Jaeger who proclaimed that he intended to drive everyone of his generation to either corruption or suicide. Meanwhile, Munch’s other sister was committed to a lunatic asylum.
The painting features a hairless mummy-like being, its hands clapped over its ears, its mouth open in a howl of utter horror and despair. The water below the bridge on which this creature stands and the sky above it seem to swirl as the shriek of distress ripples out in widening circles. Somewhat incongruously, two human figures are seen in the distance, apparently walking calmly towards the screamer.
Munch describes the evening when he got the idea of the painting 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." The “path" has since been identified as a road overlooking Oslo, coming down from the hill of Ekeberg. At the end of the road was a slaughterhouse and the asylum where Munch’s sister was confined.
Harrowing stuff, whichever way you look at it.
But perhaps it’s becauseMunch so precisely caught the essence of deepest despair that The Scream has become so universal. It’s pure communication of a class of thought that strikes almost everyone at some point of time. It represents and resonates with that whole spectrum, from the deepest existential crisis to the foulest expletive hurled at the world to hair-tearing inchoate frustration. If you can’t put it in words, just point at the painting, and everyone’ll understand. And any such language-independent graphic expression can’t escape but being “quoted" in all sorts of situations and environments.
I am told this is all part of what is called “post-modernism". So Homer Simpson, too, screams Munchly.
And does it matter at all whether Munch would have approved? One can, though, hope that the news that the pastel –on-board manifestation of his bottomless despair would sell for maybe $100 million would have cheered him up. He would have even possibly been inspired to paint a companion piece called The Joke, done in the same style.
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