The Scream

Munch fixed the moment in a diary note. He was walking along a road at sunset with two friends when the sky suddenly turned blood-red, and he stopped, worn out, feeling a great scream pass through nature. The road is a real one, on the hill of Ekeberg looking down over the fjord at Kristiania, the city now called Oslo. On that same slope stood the town slaughterhouses and the asylum where his sister Laura was a patient, so the walk already carried its weight before the sky ever changed. The figure on the bridge is not the one screaming. It has clapped its hands over its ears against a sound coming out of the landscape itself, while its two companions walk on ahead. Munch made this version in 1893 for a cycle he called the Frieze of Life, his attempt to set down love, dread and death in a row of pictures. The blood-red sky has been linked by some to the eruption of Krakatoa a decade earlier, whose dust lit lurid sunsets across Europe for months. He returned to the image four times over the next 20 years, in paint, pastel and print.