Крик

Munch traced this back to one specific evening. He was walking along a road above Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, with two friends, when he stopped, worn out, and watched the sky over the fjord turn blood-red at sunset. In his diary he wrote that he felt a huge, endless scream pass through nature, and that he seemed to hear it. That is the moment the picture holds. The hollow-faced figure on the bridge is not the one screaming. It has clapped its hands to its ears against a sound coming out of the burning sky and the dark water behind. Munch made several versions of this scene across about 20 years, in paint, in pastel, and, as here, in crayon, reworking the same red sky and the same stiff road over and over. Some researchers have since wondered whether that remembered colour was real, an after-effect of the volcano Krakatoa, whose 1883 eruption threw dust around the world and lit up skies for months. Munch only ever said the colour had frightened him, and that he painted it because that was how it had looked.