The Scream, By Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was born in Loten, Norway on December 12, 1863, but he and his family moved to Oslo when he was only a year old. In Oslo, he experienced many personal tragedies. When he was five, his mother died of tuberculosis, and his sister died of the same disease just ten years later. Another one of his sisters was institutionalized for most of her life for mental illness, and his brother died of pneumonia at the age of thirty. Raising his children alone and suffering from mental illness, Munch’s father instilled in his children a deep fear of hell and other issues. Munch’s unhappy childhood was most likely the cause for his future style of painting, which was often somber and grave. Edvard Munch spent a lot of time in Paris learning impressionism and post-impressionism, his main style being post-impressionism. He became very successful in his lifetime, but he began hearing voices and drinking heavily. In 1908, he checked himself into a sanitarium where he spent a year getting control of his alcoholism and regaining mental clarity. He checked out in 1909 and moved to a house in Ekely, near Oslo. There he began painting landscapes that were much more cheerful than his previous works. He …show more content…
Munch created four versions of this work in both paintings and pastels. The most recognizable version is an oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard. This version is found at the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. This is an abstracted piece shows a man in dark clothes screaming on a bridge. The bridge begins in the foreground where the man is standing and recedes into the middle left of the painting. Under the bridge is a dark blue river that retreats into the back middle and right of the painting. The sky consists of bright red, orange, and yellow colors, suggesting that the time of day is sunset. At the end of the bridge, two blurred people are walking toward the screaming