eLecture

Screaming for Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, born to Christian Munch, a medical officer and Laura Cathrine Bjølstad in Norway on December 12, 1863, was the second of five children. Both he and his favorite sister, Johanne Sophie (born 1862) were said to have gotten their artistic talent from their mother. When Edvard was only 6 years old, his mother died of tuberculosis. Nine years later, Sophie also died of the same disease. This left Edvard in the care of his father and his aunt Karen, who raised Edvard and his siblings.

As a child, Edvard spent much of his free time drawing. Because his father's military pay was very low, the family moved frequently from one flat to another. Edvard would create many of his earlier drawing and paintings in the interior of those flats.

By the age of 17, Munch began to focus on his paintings. As he struggled to define his own style as an artist, Edvard experimented with creating paintings in both the naturalist and impressionist styles of art, where the emphasis was on light, movement, and ordinary subject matter.

Eventually Edvard did find his style as he became one of the most well known artists of the expressionist movement. This cultural movement of art focused on creating work that expressed elements of anguish, brooding, and pain based on personal obsessions and grief. His later works became more and more personalized with images relating mostly to illness and death.

Munch held an exhibition in 1892 that shocked the public so much that the show was closed. Munch's most famous painting "The Scream", and "The Sick Child" demonstrate the trauma that Munch underwent when he witnessed the death of his mother and sister to tuberculosis. Many of the Munch's paintings convey limp figures, hidden faces, threatening shapes looming, brooding houses, sexual anxieties, and innocent sufferers. Overall the moods of his works are meloncholic and intense. Edvard Munch was hospitalized when his anxiety became too serious and he returned to Norway in 1909. Edvard Munch died in Oslo in 1944 and left significant works that were simple, vigorous and direct in style, which worked as important forces for later modern graphic art.


Painted in 1893, The Scream is Munch's most famous work and one of the most recognizable paintings in all art. It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern man.[45] Painted with broad bands of garish color and highly simplified forms, and employing a high viewpoint, the agonized figure is reduced to a garbed skull in the throes of an emotional crisis. With this painting, Munch met his stated goal of “the study of the soul, that is to say the study of my own self”.[46] Munch wrote of how the painting came to be:

I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.[47]

He later described the personal anguish behind the painting, “for several years I was almost mad…You know my picture, ‘’The Scream?’’ I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again.”[48]





Did You Know?......

• That there is mysterious graffiti scribbled within a streak of the sky in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream (1893)? No one knows whether it was Munch himself who wrote it, or if a disgruntled visitor to one of his early exhibitions scribbled the pencil inscription onto the painting itself.
But the fact remains that, for whatever reason, Munch never removed it from his now famous painting, though he must have been aware of it. What does the graffiti say? In Norwegian: “Could only have been painted by a madman”.

Source Reinhold Heller, “‘Could Only Have Been Painted by a Madman’–Or Could It?”, Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul, New York: MoMA, 2006.

• On February 12, 1994, the same day as the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, four men broke into the National Gallery and stole its version of Scream, leaving a note reading "Thanks for the poor security".[7] The painting had been moved down to a second-story[8] display as part of the Olympic festivities, and the presence of international media covering the games made the theft a sensation.[9] An early claim of responsibility by a Norwegian anti-abortion group turned out to be false. After the gallery refused a ransom demand of USD $1 million in March 1994, Norwegian police set up a sting operation with assistance from the British Police (SO10) and the Getty Museum, and the painting was recovered undamaged on May 7, 1994.[10] In January 1996, four men were convicted in connection with the theft, including Pål Enger, who in 1988 had been convicted of stealing Munch's Vampire.[11] However, they were released on appeal on legal grounds: the British agents involved in the sting operation had entered Norway under false identities.[12]

• In 2004 a version of “The Scream” was stolen from the Munch Museum in Norway by two men wearing dark ski masks. Two hours later, less than a mile away, the police found shattered wooden frames and glass from the stolen works -- a discovery that caused art experts to fear that the two treasures might already have been damaged. Three months later -- after the government refused to pay a $1 million ransom demand -- four Norwegian men were arrested in an elaborate sting operation in which British undercover agents from Scotland Yard posed as representatives of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and offered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure the painting and return it to the National Gallery in Oslo, said Leif A. Lier, the lead detective on the case and a former assistant police chief in Oslo.




Activity

Materials
• White drawing paper 12x18
• Rulers
• Pencils and erasers
• Colored Pencils, crayons, markers
• Paints, brushes, water
(students can choose any medium or teacher can choose for students depending circumstances of the class)
• Image of the Scream

1. Share this information on Edvard Munch and The Scream with students.
2. Show the painting to students and open up a discussion about what feelings the painting expresses.

-Here are some possible questions to open up the discussion:
• What colors do you see in this painting?
• What kind of mood does those colors express? Happy, sad, etc.
• What kind of lines do you see? How do the lines in the image help to set the mood of the picture?
• What do you think this man is feeling/thinking?
• Where do you think this place is?
• Is it real?

3. Next, have students create their own version of the scream. Tell students that they can change the mood of the picture by creating different kinds of lines and using different colors. Talk about what colors set different types of moods.
4. Have students use a different expression on the face of the man. Let them decide what character he could be. Is he old, short, rich, poor, happy, sad, etc.? Tell students to make it original. They can add any type of clothing or accessories to the person in the picture to help to express who he is, where he is, and what he is feeling.
5. When students are done, teacher can have a critique as a class on their work.

Variations of the Activity

• Teacher can incorporate technology into the lesson by uploading the drawings to Voicethread. Once on the website, teacher can have students critique their classmate’s work either by text or voice.
• For lower grades, teacher can focus on color mixing. Oil pastels can be used to mix colors in their pictures. A mini lesson can be taught prior to this lesson about primary and secondary colors and color blending.
• Try recreating the image using only one color with white/black to create a monochromatic image. This is a nice play on setting mood and teaches students about color mixing.

References

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edvard_Munch
• http://arthistory.we-wish.net/2007/04/29/did-you-know-edvard-munch-the-scream/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism
• http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/world/munch-s-scream-is-stolen-from-a-crowded-museum-in-oslo.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scream
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sick_Child
• http://www.arthistoryguide.com/travel/travel23.aspx