Why Is the Figure in The Scream Screaming? Munch's 1893 Painting, Versions and Thefts

The Scream is about a sudden moment of overwhelming anxiety. The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch based it on his own memory of walking along a path above Oslo at sunset, when the sky turned blood red and he felt an "infinite scream passing through nature". The figure in the front is not screaming at something outside; it is covering its ears against a scream that seems to come from the world itself. That is why the agonised face has become one of the most famous images in art, widely seen as a symbol of the anxiety of modern life.

What the painting shows

In the foreground, a pale, almost skeletal figure with a skull-like head holds its hands to its face, mouth wide open. Behind it, a road with a railing runs diagonally across the picture. Two figures in dark clothes walk away in the distance. On the left lies a blue-black fjord, and above everything stretches a sky of wavy orange and red bands.

Nothing in the picture is calm. The lines of the sky, the water and even the body of the figure bend and flow in the same restless curves, as if the whole landscape is vibrating. Only the straight railing cuts through the scene, which makes the twisting of everything else even stronger.

Munch's own words

Munch wrote about the experience more than once. In one account he described walking along a road with two friends as the sun was setting. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. He stopped, felt exhausted and leaned on the fence, while his friends walked on and he stood there trembling with anxiety, sensing an infinite scream passing through nature. Some scholars believe, from these descriptions, that he was describing a panic attack.

The place can still be found. It has been identified as a road on the hill of Ekeberg, looking over Oslo and the Oslofjord. At the time Munch painted the work, his sister Laura was a patient at the mental asylum at the foot of that hill, which some writers see as part of the emotional background of the picture.

Who was Edvard Munch?

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was a Norwegian painter whose childhood was shaped by illness, loss and the fear of inheriting a mental condition that ran in his family. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, and his favourite sister Sophie died of the same disease at the age of fifteen in 1877.

As a young artist in Kristiania (the old name of Oslo), he was encouraged to paint his own emotional and psychological state, an idea sometimes called "soul painting". In Paris he learned from the colour of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. The Scream became part of a large series he later called The Frieze of Life, about love, anxiety, jealousy and betrayal. His work had a strong influence on the Expressionist movement.

Why is the sky red?

People have argued about the orange-red sky for a long time. One theory says Munch remembered the strange red sunsets that followed the huge Krakatoa volcanic eruption of 1883, which coloured skies in parts of the world for months. Other scholars reject this, pointing out that Munch was an expressive painter, not someone trying to record exactly what he saw. Another idea is that he saw nacreous clouds, rare shining clouds that can appear at Norway's latitude. Whatever the cause, Munch himself said he painted the clouds as actual blood and that "the colour shrieked".

The figure, too, may have a real model. The scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested in 1978 that it was inspired by a Peruvian mummy displayed at the 1889 world's fair in Paris, which Munch could have seen.

One image, several versions

There is not just one Scream. Munch made two painted versions and two in pastel, plus a lithograph stone from which several prints survive.

• 1893 painted version — in oil, tempera, pastel and crayon on cardboard, held by the National Museum of Norway in Oslo.
• 1893 pastel — possibly a preliminary study, held by the Munch Museum in Oslo.
• 1895 pastel — in a private collection; in 2012 it set an auction record for the time.
• 1910 painted version — made when Munch returned to earlier subjects, also at the Munch Museum.

The 1893 painting hides a small secret. In the upper left corner there is a faint pencil note saying it "could only have been painted by a madman". For years people assumed a visitor had written it, but handwriting studies using infrared photography showed that Munch wrote it himself, possibly after harsh criticism when the work was shown in Norway in 1895.

Two famous thefts

Both painted versions have been stolen and recovered. On 12 February 1994, the opening day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, two men broke into the National Gallery in Oslo and took the 1893 version, leaving a note that thanked the museum for its poor security. With help from British police, Norwegian police recovered it undamaged on 7 May 1994.

Ten years later, on 22 August 2004, masked gunmen walked into the Munch Museum in daylight and took the 1910 version together with Munch's Madonna. For two years there were fears the works had been destroyed. Police finally recovered both on 31 August 2006. The Scream had moisture damage in its lower left corner, and after conservation it went back on display in 2008.

Why it still matters

The writer Arthur Lubow called The Scream "a Mona Lisa for our time". Munch helped show that a painting could express what a person feels inside rather than what the eye sees outside, an idea at the heart of Expressionism. In the twentieth century the image was copied and parodied everywhere: Andy Warhol made silk-screen prints of it, and the face on the poster for the 1990 film Home Alone was inspired by it. Even the screaming-face emoji usually looks like Munch's figure. More than a century later, the picture still gives a shape to a feeling most people know but find hard to describe.

Learn with The Scream: English phrases for feelings

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to be overwhelmed	to feel too much at once	I was overwhelmed by the news.
a panic attack	a sudden strong feeling of fear	She had a panic attack before the exam.
to send shivers down your spine	to make you feel fear or excitement	The music sent shivers down my spine.
to capture a feeling	to show an emotion clearly	This photo captures the feeling of summer.
iconic	very famous and easy to recognise	It is an iconic image.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a moment when you felt overwhelmed, using "to be overwhelmed" and "to capture a feeling".