Scream. Description of the painting by Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch in late XIX century, he greatly excited the artistic community with his works, which went far beyond the generally accepted norms of that time. He abandoned the naturalism that prevailed in Kaiser's Germany in favor of a symbol and emotion, causing censure from many established artists and admiration for young creators who at all times yearn for something new. As judged by time, Munch's innovation was not a desire to stand out, but a manifestation of a unique style, the pinnacle of which was the painting "The Scream".

Drawing for Munch was not just a craft or hobby - it was his passion, a real illness, from which he categorically did not want to be cured. The artist described the state of creation as intoxication, and sobriety, in this context, did not attract him at all. As a result, he created great amount works: engravings, drawings and paintings. The productivity of the artist is truly amazing - he wrote more than a thousand oil paintings alone.

The world was perceived by the artist as not the most rosy place. Despair, pessimism and tragedy - this is how you can characterize his attitude. It is these emotions that appear in the works of Munch, but not in the form of a painful phobia, but as a philosophical reaction to reality.

But the philosophy in the master's paintings can sometimes be difficult to see behind a storm of emotions: instead of real objects, his canvases are full of contrasting spots, the space is blurred, and the faces are more like mournful masks, which are symbols of human grief. In this manner, a series of his works “The Frieze of Life” was made, to which the artist devoted about thirty years of his life. It is to this series that "Scream" belongs, to which "Despair" precedes.

The history of the creation of the picture was described by the author himself: “ I was walking along the road with two comrades. The sun was setting. The sky suddenly turned blood red, and I felt an explosion of melancholy, gnawing pain under my heart. I stopped and leaned against the fence, dead tired. Blood and flames lay over the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends continued to walk, and I was left behind, trembling with fear, and I heard an endless scream piercing nature».

It was "The Scream" that became the most famous work Edvard Munch. Why did the faceless silhouette, uttering a cry of despair, resonate with the mass consciousness? The answer lies in the question itself. Almost everyone, more or less sensitive person, burdened with intellect and consciousness, living in society - periodically have to experience the same despair, fear, a feeling of powerlessness. The picture is the apogee of mental generalization. Take a close look at the tense mask, silently screaming from unbearable psychological stress against the background of a blurry, but no less intense background.

Take a look and listen to your feelings. Abstract from the name of the author, the momentary moment and the very meaning of what is happening. Feel all the horror that the artist put into his silent scream. Let the associations draw parallels with your own experience, expose your soul, tender and quivering, languishing from meaninglessness and futility, tired and disappointed, raped by someone else's rudeness and indifference. Splash it all through visual image scream and leave it on the canvas. Once and forever.

Plot

People are standing on the bridge under the crimson sky. In the landscape, one can guess the view of the fjord from the Ekeberg hill in Oslo (which during Munch was called Christiania).

Essence central image remains a mystery. The artist did not seek to draw this figure. Munch writes the sound itself, the state. See how the lines that paint the landscape and the flashy are coordinated. They seem to be in resonance. Man hears the cry of nature and reacts to it, and nature cannot but respond to the state of man. In fact, this is the idea of ​​universal unity.

In nature, you will not find a single perfectly straight line. And Munch paints the environment exactly in the form in which it was created. “I paint not what I see, but what I saw,” he said.

There are 40 copies of Munch's "The Scream"

About what formed the basis of the "Scream", the artist himself wrote in his diary: "I was walking along the path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red, I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned against the fence - I looked on the blood and flames over the bluish-black fjord and the city - my friends went on, and I stood trembling with excitement, feeling the endless cry piercing nature.

What did the area depicted in the picture look like?

The image that was born in Munch is a synthesis of what he felt at that time, those moods that hovered in Norway, childhood fears, endless depression and loneliness.

It is possible that the crimson color of the sky is not an exaggeration. Munch could actually see such a color. In 1883, a powerful volcanic eruption occurred in Krakatoa. A huge amount of ash was thrown into the atmosphere, which is why for several years especially colorful, fiery sunsets were observed around the world.

It is quite possible that the scream that Munch heard was not some kind of idea or hallucination. Near Ekeberg were Oslo's largest slaughterhouse and residential psychiatric facility. The cries of the slaughtered animals, along with the cries of the mentally ill, were unbearable.

Context

There are about forty "Screams" in total. Four of them are picturesque paintings(they appeared between 1893 and 1910), the rest of the works are graphic (including printed graphics and drawings). The picture was conceived as part of the "frieze" - a series about love, life and death.

"The Scream" is part of a cycle of paintings about love, life and death

The Scream was first presented to the public at the Berlin exhibition in December 1893. Of course, no one understood anything, criticism took up arms against Munch, and even the police had to be invited to the gallery so that angry people would not start a pogrom.

frieze fragment

The audience wondered how such a pleasant young man could paint such terrible pictures. However, it was this work that became programmatic for expressionism. She brought piercing loneliness and despair to art. We, who know what the world is waiting for in the 20th century, willy-nilly want to call Munch a soothsayer.

The fate of the artist

Munch's family was extremely religious. His mother died of tuberculosis when Edward was 5 years old. Later, Sophie's older sister died of the same disease. Munch himself miraculously escaped the same fate.

Edward did not graduate from the Royal Christiania School of Design - he did not agree with the principles of academicism and naturalism, which could not be changed. Munch began an independent search for means of expressing his ideas. The first scandal was not long in coming. Critics literally ridiculed the painting "Sick Girl", in which the artist painted the dying Sophie. The canvas was called a miscarriage, a defect. However, Munch did not try to convey the situation in which his sister was dying, it was more important for him to transfer his impressions, pain and loss to the canvas.

"Madonna" (1894−1895). This painting is called the embodiment of Munch's art.

In the second half of the 1880s, the artist became a regular at the meetings of Bohemia Christiania, a community of philosophers, writers, musicians, and artists that existed until the death of its main inspirer, the anarchist writer Hans Jaeger. Under the clink of glasses they discussed politics, social problems, moral crisis society, ideas about sexual behavior and taboos.

Munch's paintings were called miscarriages and degenerate art

In the early 1890s, Munch spent a lot of time in France, where, of course, he saw the work of Van Gogh and Gauguin. And the influence that they had on him is noticeable, including in Scream: bright colors(which Munch did not have before), images of flowing lines, a clearer drawing.

In Munch's workshop, 1902

In the future, the artist's style becomes more and more sharp, sweeping, the subject, mood changes, the anguish that was in early works. Gradually, they began to get used to Munch's art, criticism was no longer so categorical, the artist even had wealthy patrons.

For the last 15 years, the artist has hardly worked - due to a hemorrhage in the vitreous body of his right eye, he began to have vision problems. And when Norway was occupied in 1940 Nazi Germany, Munch again fell into anxiety, this time for the life and property that the Nazis could confiscate. He died in 1944.

A series of paintings by Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch , created between 1893 and 1910 and summarized by him under the name "Scream" - can be classified as a cultural phenomenon. The image of a creature screaming in horror, written in the 19th century, is considered the fundamental work of expressionism. But at the end of the 20th century, he suddenly acquires the status of a symbol of pop culture. In terms of the number of remakes, memes and parodies, Munch's pictorial image has become the most frequently reproduced in the world. And when the image artistic culture included in mass consciousness- we can talk about an important cultural phenomenon.

The plot of Munch's painting was based on his own feelings, described in his diary in 1892.

“I was walking along the path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red, I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned against the fence - I looked at the blood and flames over the bluish-black fjord and the city - my friends went on, and I stood trembling with excitement, feeling the endless cry piercing nature.

Visualization of this note can serve as a promotional video auction Sotheby's (Sotheby's), in which the work of Munch from the series "Scream", made in pastel, was sold for a record 119 million dollars.

The picture shows exactly the place where he was seized by a terrible feeling. The landscape behind the figure is not at all fictional. This is the neglected district of Ekeberg, in the vicinity of Oslo, where suicides often occurred. Nearby was a psychiatric hospital, where Munch's beloved sister was hospitalized, with a diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis. To top it off, there were slaughterhouses at the base of the cliff, from which came the piercing cries of animals.
Recognizable details - the fjord, boats, the old church find themselves in a kind of apocalyptic landscape that conveys the oppression of the world, and the bloody sunset becomes the focus of a nightmare.
Emotionally, the paintings of the Scream series echo graphic etchings "Caprichos" created in 1797-1798 Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. And just as Goya, who depicted his chimerical visions in order to get rid of them, Munch, absorbed in the idea behind the picture, tirelessly reproduced the vision that frightened him. The artist changed the structure, technique and coloring of the copies, preserving the deep existential essence.

Munch was only 29 years old when he painted The Scream, but the artist's creative innovation shocked his contemporaries. On the one hand, most of his colleagues, including Toulouse Lautrec, resented Munch's "barbaric" technique and did not perceive the aggressive aesthetics of his work. (After all, the end of the 19th century was devoted to the cult of physical beauty, which meant, first of all, calmness, a feeling of satisfaction, as on the face of Mona Lisa). On the other hand, art critics were stunned by the conceptual approach of the author. His idea was paradoxical: by definition, the picture is silent. But the artist must make her scream.

Of course, screaming people were depicted before him, but Munch depicted the very phenomenon of screaming. It was an innovation in painting. No one had portrayed sound before him, especially sound that was emotionally colored. The undulating lines of the landscape, like an echo, follow the rounded contours of the head and wide open mouth- as if the sound of a scream echoed everywhere. The intricate, unrealistic curves of the lines in the image of the central figure and nature (reminiscent of the half-crazy Wangogian style) fill the composition with energy and drama.

In 1895, Mune created a lithograph, a simplified black-and-white version of his painting, which opened Pandora's box: the path to its mass replication using printing technologies. Those who were developing the theme of serial production of art were the first to become interested in this. One of the founders of this trend and the creator - created a series of silk-screen prints based on the works of Munch. But that was only the beginning.

It turned out that "The Scream" fits perfectly with the culture of the post-industrial era subject to the epidemic of postmodernism, where everything is based on quotes from the past and is subjected to secondary processing. Munch's painting became a pop "icon", the image of which began to spread massively in the information space like a viral advertisement.

The recognizable plot of the picture is widely exploited by the creators of advertising, animated series and various shows. In addition, the image turned out to be an endless source for creating ironic Internet - memes, emoticons and comics. Psychologists explain this by the fact that behind the irony modern man tries to hide the fright from the realization of his fragility and insecurity, the fright that he feels when looking at the apocalyptic picture of the world through the eyes of Edvard Munch.

The image, created by the Norwegian artist, is often depicted in a kitsch (ironic) manner, as if the 20th century is trying to remove the original unsettling atmosphere of the picture, like industrial ventilation of the smells of the kitchen.

But not only web— web, and almost all areas of art came under the influence of Munch's work. The personification of horror, ingeniously depicted by him, was repeatedly used in music, literature and cinema. Recall at least the killer mask from the horror movie "Scream" or appearance representatives of an alien race from the cult TV series "Doctor Who". They were inspired by the character in Munch's painting. Even the facial expression of the young Macaulay Culkin, well known to the audience, screaming in front of a mirror in Chris Columbus's Christmas comedy Home Alone, is also a parody allusion to the work of Edvard Munch.

It should be added that this work inspired many film directors and screenwriters to create films of various kinds. But, none of the films ever came close in terms of tragedy and emotionality to Edvard Munch's masterpiece.

Over time, the plot of the picture began to appear on almost everything: on clothes, shoes, dishes, jewelry and other, sometimes unthinkable things, like inflatable dolls by Robert Fishbone, who managed to create a profitable production of these dolls, each of which repeated the image of the central figure of Munch's composition.

Naturally, such a mass consumer product as food, also did not stand aside. As part of the anniversary project Munch-150" The Norwegian factory "Freya" has released a series of milk chocolate bars depicting Munch's paintings from the "Freya Frieze" series. After all, the name of the author is directly related to the history of this factory. 18 of his paintings adorned the walls of the factory canteen in January 1923. The founder of the factory, Johan Throne Holst, was extremely pleased with the result. However, the workers themselves did not quite like the paintings: the expressionist Munch painted people without facial features in the paintings, and the houses depicted were painted without doors and pipes.

The modern version of this format is "Cafe Munch" which opened the same year in Tokyo, organized by the Scandinavian Tourism Authority. The cafe presents 37 copies of paintings famous artist and the exclusive menu includes delicious cakes and coffee with a familiar look.

Cafe Munch (Tokyo)

It can be said that art and food are two global areas human life–– masterfully learned to combine food art . The image created by Munch more than a hundred years ago and received worldwide “publicity” is most successfully combined with his ideas and scale. In the blog articles ART library of food» we have already presented some of these objects. For example, in an article about or about the American. We would like to give some more examples of creative rethinking and parody of the painting "The Scream" related to food.

Japanese illustrator Takayo Shiyota's original work has become an internet sensation, using nori seaweed, boiled rice and other traditional Japanese ingredients to create reproductions of iconic works of art. The Scream character appeared on the cut of sushi rolls, and then in.

Pizzerias and vegan cafes have begun to use it to decorate their dishes.

On January 23, the art world celebrates the 150th anniversary of the death of the Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch. The most famous of his paintings - "The Scream" - was made in four versions. All canvases of this series are shrouded mystical stories, and the artist's intention has not yet been fully unraveled.

Munch himself, explaining the idea of ​​the picture, admitted that he depicted the "cry of nature." "I was walking along the road with friends. The sun was setting. The sky turned blood red. I was seized with melancholy. I stood mortally tired against the background of dark blue. The fjord and the city hung in fiery flames. I lagged behind my friends. Trembling with fear, I heard cry of nature" - these words are engraved by the artist's hand on the frame framing one of the canvases.

Art critics and historians interpreted what was depicted in the picture in different ways. According to one version, the blood-red sky could have become due to the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883. Volcanic ash painted the sky reddish - a phenomenon that could be observed in the eastern United States, Europe and Asia from November 1883 to February 1884. Munch could also observe it.

According to another version, the picture became the fruit mental disorder artist. Munch suffered from manic-depressive psychosis, all his life he was tormented by fears and nightmares, depression and loneliness. He tried to drown out his pain with alcohol, drugs and, of course, transferred it to the canvas - four times. “Illness, madness and death are black angels who stood guard over my cradle and accompanied me all my life,” Munch wrote about himself.

Existential horror, piercing and panicky - that's what is depicted in the picture, art critics say. It is so strong that it literally falls on the viewer, who himself suddenly turns into a figure in the foreground, covering his head with his hands - to protect himself from a "scream", real or fictional.

Some tend to see The Scream as a prophecy. So, co-chairman of the board of directors of Sotheby's auction David Norman, who was lucky enough to sell one of the paintings in the series for $ 120 million, expressed the opinion that Munch in his works predicted the 20th century with its two world wars, the Holocaust, environmental disasters and nuclear weapons .

There is a belief that all versions of The Scream are cursed. Mysticism, according to art critic and Munch specialist Alexander Prufrock, is confirmed real cases. Dozens of people who came into contact with the canvases in one way or another fell ill, quarreled with loved ones, fell into severe depression or died suddenly. All this created a bad reputation for the paintings. Once an employee of the museum in Oslo accidentally dropped the canvas. After some time, he began to have terrible headaches, seizures became stronger, and in the end he committed suicide. Museum visitors still look at the painting with apprehension.

The figure of either a man or a ghost in "The Scream" also caused a lot of controversy. In 1978, art critic Robert Rosenblum quipped that the sexless creature in the foreground might have been inspired by a Peruvian mummy that Munch may have seen at the Paris World's Fair in 1889. To other commentators, she resembled a skeleton, an embryo, and even a spermatozoon.

Munch's "Scream" is reflected in popular culture. The creator of the famous mask from the movie "Scream" was inspired by the masterpiece of the Norwegian expressionist.

It turns out that artists often turn to science in search of inspiration. We present you a selection of the most interesting stories creating artistic masterpieces.

Edvard Munch. "Scream"

• The Scream by Edvard Munch

The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893. In his diary, he said that he was inspired by the blood-red sky he saw while walking with friends. The amazing atmosphere of the picture gave rise to a lot of controversy about what exactly Munch saw in the sky. One of the most popular hypotheses suggests that the artist may have observed the ash from the Krakatoa volcano after it erupted in 1883.

About the most recent guesses of researchers, Popular Mechanics already: a meteorologist from the University of Oslo suggested that Edvard Munch could be inspired by seeing a rare phenomenon in the sky - mother-of-pearl clouds, which are caused by low temperatures and high light levels.

Maria Sibylla Merian. watercolor drawing guava tree (Psidium guajava), tarantula (Avicularia avicularia), cross spider (Avicularia gen. spec.), wolf spider (Rhoicinus spec.), American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), leaf cutter ant (Atta cephalotes), tailor ant (Oecophylla spec.), hummingbird (Trochilidae gen. spec.).

• Science Sketches as Art, Maria Sibylla Merian

German artist Maria Sibylla Merian saw beauty where others didn't. As an entomologist, she often depicted insects in her paintings. In 1705, the artist made a sketch of a tarantula eating a hummingbird. Her work eventually gave the name to an entire family of spiders (tarantulas). Despite the fact that at first her engraving was criticized and called "pure fiction", later it was proved that tarantulas still sometimes eat poultry meat.

Most of the most striking works of Maria Sibylla Merian appeared thanks to her two-year scientific expedition to Suriname ( South America) from 1699 to 1701. She depicted in detail the metamorphoses of insects that no one had ever seen before, and researchers around the world are still searching for some of the representatives captured by her.

William Turner. "The Decline of Carthage"

• Volcanic Sunsets by William Turner

British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (better known as William Turner) was famous for his paintings of spectacular sunsets, raging seas and moonlit scenes. According to a study published in 2014 in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Turner painted his famous sunsets in 1816 as a result of volcanic emissions from the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption (which was the largest volcanic eruption in human history). As a result, global climatic anomalies were established in the world, which gave rise to the Year Without Summer.

Mehmet Berkmen and Maria Penil."Neurons"

• Masterpieces from microbes

In the American Society for Microbiology's annual art competition, bacteria and yeast become paint, and agar-agar becomes canvas. Microbiologists are creating masterpieces inside petri dishes, such as the work by Mehmet Berkmen and Maria Penil called Neurons. She won first prize in 2015, beating a map of New York made from microbes and a picture of a farm in harvest season made from yeast.

Vincent Van Gogh. " Starlight Night»

• Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" may seem bizarre and unrealistic, but it also has to do with science. In 2006, physicists from the National Autonomous University in Mexico devoted an entire study to this masterpiece. They found out that Van Gogh actually depicted turbulence. I wonder what it is physical phenomenon the artist also depicted in other paintings on which he worked during the struggle with mental problems. These are, for example, "Road with a cypress and a star" and "Wheat field with crows."