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[Music]
under a blood red sky a terrifying
figure with a skull-like face is staring
out at us
and it appears to be screaming in
anguish
edward monks the scream one of the most
famous images in the history of art has
become for us a universal symbol of
angst and anxiety
europe was at the birth of the modern
era when he painted the screen and the
image reflects the intense anxieties
that troubled the world at this time
anxieties which edvard monk himself
found overwhelming
the figure is in fact not screaming at
all
rather it is holding its hands over its
ears
to block out the screen
[Music]
between 1863 when monk was born and the
years before the first world war
european cities were going through truly
exceptional changes
industrialization and economic shifts
brought fear obsessions diseases
political unrest and radicalism
questions were being raised about
society and the changing role of man
within it
about our psyche
our social responsibilities
and most radical of all about the
existence of god
the rich were getting richer but in
christiania now oslo living and working
conditions were as bad as ever a major
cause of death and disease
monk himself would endure a life ravaged
by madness sickness and death
his mother and his sister both died of
tuberculosis
his father and grandfather suffered from
depression and another sister laura from
schizophrenia
his only brother would later die of
pneumonia
always a sickly child himself monk
turned to drawing to keep himself
occupied in his sick bed
when he later decided to become an
artist his father a fundamental
christian gave him no support as he
considered the profession unholy he told
his son that the death of his mother and
sister was divine punishment for their
sins and his traumatic childhood never
left him as an adult
this would have a lasting effect on
monk's work
his early paintings were grounded in
realism but in 1884 he joined
christiania's bohemian circle which was
led by the anarchist writer hans yeager
yeager encouraged monk to reject
religion break with bourgeois principles
and morals and move away from realism to
paint his own emotional and
psychological state
a powerful painting dating from this
period drew on the death of his sister
and mother
it is hard now to imagine the outrage it
caused but the bourgeois norwegians
despised the rough brushstrokes scratch
surface and the deep melancholy of the
piece
the painting and the ensuing scandal
would set the tone for his future work
monk was looking outside of provincial
christiania and on a short trip to paris
in 1885 he had the chance to see the
revolutionary work of the impressionists
their use of colour and form was a
revelation for the young artist
monk was always loathed to admit that he
was influenced by any artists but here
we can compare monet's solitary figure
lost in thought with monk's own later
composition
whereas monet's paintings are a study of
light on the exterior monk is exploring
the interior life and already shows a
preoccupation with loneliness and angst
the years in paris were his experimental
years when monk was finding his style
and in 1889 he returned to paris to
study for three years
the eiffel tower had just been completed
the post-impressionists were becoming
established and vincent van gogh had
just painted the starry night
van gogh's expressive and emotional
brush work deeply influenced monk
as did his use of color
monk understood that van gogh's
posthumous fame was thanks to a
combination of his paintings and his
tragic personal story and later monk was
not averse to marketing himself as a mad
genius which he understood would play an
important role in his art
mostly he was fascinated by paul gauguin
and the symbolists whose ideas he would
expand on
gauguin's use of heavy outline
simplified shapes and solid blocks of
color would influence monk's style
he would later adopt the bold graphic
outlines of gogan van gogh and ahri de
toulouse latrek whose posters were on
the streets of paris where monk arrived
the young artist was like a sponge
soaking up painting styles ideas and
motifs from different artists sometimes
in a more obvious way and like most
artists of this period he experimented
with pointillism
what really interested him about the
post-impressionists was their rejection
of realism in favor of absolute truth
through their own emotional experience
and imagination
the unique thing about monk was how he
would take these formal tools and ideas
from french painting and then combine
them with a northern sensibility more
concerned with melancholy
in 1892 he was invited to berlin where
the psychological insights would not be
welcome
monk was invited to put on a solo show
in berlin but the organizers had no
first-hand experience of his work
norwegian paintings of fjords were very
fashionable and they were expecting this
the germans thought his work was too raw
too brutal and too unfinished the show
was so controversial that it would be
shut down after a week
monk however was delighted with the
scandal as his notoriety ensured he
became an overnight sensation in germany
in berlin he was friends with the
swedish writer august strindberg and as
so often with monk it was literature he
looked to for inspiration to explain
universal human experiences
we can see his work in this period as
moving away from painting one image and
more towards series of works that can be
viewed in literary terms
the masterful series he produced in the
1890s the freeze of life was intended to
be seen as a poem of life love and death
and it would be his life's major work
the series started with six but
eventually grew to a total of 22 works
the scream would be just one of them
the impressionists had of course worked
in series but more as an observation on
light and atmospheric conditions
whereas monk was working this way to
create a total work of art or in german
a gazant kunswork
monk split the works into four themes
and when we place them together as he
would have we can see he was trying to
tell a story
here we have the seeds of love
the passing of love
anxiety
and death
around this time monk started to produce
multiple versions of many of his
paintings
there was a practical reason behind it
his idea was to keep the freeze of life
together and eventually donate them as a
whole to a museum in oslo when he died
so when he sold a painting he then
produced a copy to replace it to avoid
breaking up the group the more popular
the painting the more copies there are
in existence
on top of this he had a pathological
hatred of parting with his paintings
which he called my children
it was as if he couldn't bear to part
with his past
[Music]
on the 22nd of january 1892 monk wrote
in his diary i was walking down the road
with two friends when the sun set
suddenly the sky turned as red as blood
my friends walked on i stood there
quaking with angst and i felt as though
a vast endless scream passed through
nature
what is debatable is whether those
screams were real or psychological
the idea of the figure in the landscape
a man's relationship to nature is
something that monk draws on from the
romantic tradition of the early 19th
century
but the scream focuses on the inner
psychology of man in relation to nature
a painting he did just a year before the
scream is a rather similar image but
with a small crowd of ghostly figures
staring out at us the painting conveys
urban alienation the feeling that you
can be all alone in a crowd
and monk's figure in the scream
expresses similar ideas about anxiety
and alienation
the disturbing figures are a reoccurring
theme for monk and he used the same
setting to produce other paintings
this painting also has the same red and
yellow sky mountains and fjords in the
background but instead of the skeletal
figure staring out at us there is a
self-portrait of monk
the composition itself is simple we can
divide the painting into the bridge the
fjords and the sky
the main figure is curved and broadens
out to blend into the background
the two figures his friends in the diary
entry are vertical unlike the main
figure this with the sharp diagonals of
the bridge anchor us in the real world
the background suggests the world is
dissolving into chaos and pre-figures
abstract painting
the tiny figures are deep in
conversation and despite the chaos they
are oblivious
monk underlines their emotional distance
from the protagonist by placing them at
a physical distance walking away on an
absolutely straight road the painting
may look as if it is done quickly but
monk would go through meticulous
preparation
here we see the development of the lone
figure as it goes from the far distance
to the foreground
in his diary sketch the violent red sky
develops and written to the side is his
description of that walk with his
friends
the self-portrait will give way to the
figure we know note in this sketch one
of the two background figures is not yet
walking away
if we take the two figures away
completely the scene is not as
claustrophobic and it changes the
atmosphere every element in the painting
is carefully planned
and even after all this planning monk
made last minute changes as we see with
this initial sketch on the reverse
this 1893 painting is probably his first
version of the scream it is mixed media
oil tempera and pastel
this one also dated 1893 is in pastel
107 billion
hammer
the only one in private hands
and this is a later copy from 1910 also
temper
all the paintings are done on unprimed
cardboard monk often worked with cheap
material first because he couldn't
afford canvas and later because the
texture suited his aesthetic
they were often glued onto wooden boards
as we can see here a treatment no longer
used
he would use diluted paint a technique
he picked up from toulouse-lautrec
and he deliberately left paintings
unfinished as a sort of anti-art
statement
he wanted the cardboard to show through
the various diluted layers of pastels to
allow the process to show
at times he has violently stabbed on
paint with the back of his brush he
never varnished his work as he liked the
matte finish insisting varnish killed a
painting dead
then he had something which he called
the horse cure
this was basically leaving his paintings
outside in the garden in all weathers to
fend for themselves he thought his
painting should have an organic life and
he wanted them to look aged
here we can see one of the many stains
on the painting where monk in this case
spilled some wax on it all of these add
up to a nightmare for conservators say
two or three armed masked men burst into
the monk museum in oslo in broad
daylight and took the paintings as
visitors watched one of the ironies
about the scream is that when it was
recovered after being stolen it was
quickly jumped upon by a small army of
conservators monk however would have
preferred they left it damaged as part
of its ongoing life
[Music]
i think it is interesting to look at
possible inspiration
scientists have linked the sky's
unnatural colours to volcanic dust from
the eruption of krakatoa in 1883 which
generated incredible sunsets in europe
for months after
they have also linked it to a phenomenon
known as nacreous cloud formations
common in norway during winter which is
when monk painted the scream
a possible inspiration for the figure is
this peruvian mummy which monk certainly
saw on display at the paris world's fair
of 1889
the figure itself is featureless
ungendered and de-individualized
and perhaps one of the reasons why
despite being a deeply personal painting
it has become a universal symbol of
anxiety
it is a blank page into which you can
project yourself and so it becomes about
what we the viewer bring to it
the figure is looking right at us which
pins us down locking us into the angst
ridden scene
barely visible on the painting is a
pencil inscription stating could only
have been painted by a madman
infrared images show that it was monk's
handwriting and that it was written
after the painting was first exhibited
in 1895.
several important critics had questioned
monk's mental health and it deeply hurt
the artist who had a morbid fear of
insanity we can look at the later added
inscription as an angry ironic comment
from monk
then there is another inscription by
monk on an earlier lithograph
i felt a huge scream through nature
confirming that the figure is not
screaming at all but nature around him
is
what is interesting is why monk was in
that location in the first place
the setting of the scream came about
after the artist took a scenic walk as
described in his diary the actual place
is called ekberg which overlooks oslo
ford with a view towards the setting sun
during the winter months
but as so often with monk his strength
is how he departs from reality he was
not here for the scenery but to visit
his younger sister laura who had
recently been confined to an asylum near
their spot
monk's father had just died and after a
lifetime of abandonment through death
and disease
it is not too difficult to imagine the
distress that he must have experienced
as he left his beloved sister behind
her screams of terror must have haunted
him as he walked away
in a world of extreme and rapid change
combined with a life of desperate
anxiety and alienation monk who would
have a nervous breakdown in 1908 must
have felt overwhelmed as if his life was
unraveling
all of us in some way understand the
desperate feeling monk must have had of
wanting to block out all of this noise
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