A street artist depiction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, on N. Hanley Road under the I-70 overpass in St. Louis. (Photo by Ben Fulton)
Edvard Munch’s The Scream qualifies as an iconic image only for people who have never seen it. Its power to transfix, its ineluctable pull on the eye, is such that it qualifies as iconic before we even define the word. For everyone else who has seen it recycled and repurposed from The Simpsons to short films The Scream is a tautology that has long worn out its welcome.
This is a small shame, not because its familiarity breeds contempt, but because it breeds indifference. Like the haggard homeless person loitering near your favorite neighborhood hangout, listless and talking to himself, it is hard to be reminded that insanity and horror can be so persuasively expressed in one image. It is fun to ponder why Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa smiles. It should disturb us to ask why Munch’s figure is so rapt in fear that he must hold his head in both hands, closing his ears to whatever the world has to say, or whatever he is imagining it says. Surely the fact that this painting has been so endlessly parodied says something about our refusal, however unconscious, to hear what Munch had to say. We must not think of our own tenuous connections to reality. We can express that tenuous connection via the Munch-inspired emoji.
Every painting is silent but also speaks. In this way, The Scream shares an affinity with John Cage’s 4’ 33″, which asks us to discover our own music in silence. Clearly the figure of Munch’s painting hears something. Does it matter if the sound is invading his senses from the outside, or tormenting him from within in a struggle to express, or hide it, from the two figures at the left?
No two people share the same perception of reality, a fact of our subjective world and the idea that makes us individual. Sanity and rational behavior exist on a spectrum that allows people to live together. Wonder too far off and others will lose patience with you and, given society’s many remedies for mental illness, you might also lose patience with yourself. Munch’s painting is a hive of questions we would rather not provoke, an unsettling reminder that sends some art aficionados back into art’s antiquated past of museums chock full of serene landscape paintings and portraits of Mary and infant Jesus.
If any of this sounds heavy-handed, let us not forget that Munch insisted he be taken at his own word. Oslo counts easily as one of the world’s most picturesque cities. So much so that it seems unbelievable its vistas would disturb anyone. But artists of genius are artists of genius because they see what is hidden to everyone else.
“The sun was setting and the clouds turned red as blood. I sensed a scream passing through nature. I felt as though I could actually hear the scream,” Munch wrote of his own panic attack in 1892, one year before he painted the image on cardboard. “I felt as though I could actually hear the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds like real blood. The colors shrieked.”
The Scream is probably the only painting to be stolen twice, by the same thief, among other facts that lend Munch’s image an almost gravitational pull in the art world.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norway’s most famous writer of the moment, and who chronicles his own life and thoughts in books that push the boundary of memoir into borderline tedium, found Munch, who died just one year short of the end of World War Two, a kindred spirit because he expressed So Much Longing in So Little Space, the title of his book about the artist.
“When you see The Scream, you see a famous painting, but the reason he painted it was the opposite. He wanted you to see something you never have seen before,” Knausgaard told Vanity Fair.
The Scream is so familiar that it is impossible to see it again for the first time. But even the familiar, or what does not initially challenge us, can trigger understandings that we never noticed before.
By drawing a line between the thoughts of the man who created it in 1893, and the endless parodies it has inspired since, The Scream helps us better appreciate the polarizing natures of sincerity and comedy. By drawing a line between its disturbed central figure and the serenity of the two bystanders at the vanishing point of the painting’s perspective, The Scream asks us to question the “sanity” we pretend to hold on to. And by drawing a line between the sights we refuse to see when we deny The Scream’s visual force and quiet power of the sounds it asks us to imagine, we cross back and forth, almost endlessly until the end of our lives, between the two.
