It was painted in 1895, and on the frame is a poem by Munch:
"I was walking along the road with two friends
the sun was setting - the sky turned a bloody red
And I felt a whiff of melancholy - I stood
still, deathly tired - over the blue-black
fjord and city hung blood and tongues of fire
my friends walked on - I remained behind
- shivering with anxiety - I felt the great scream in nature - EM"
His biographer, Sue Prideaux, says that it is impossible to ignore the image's wider context - a widespread late-19th Century sense of unease as the works of Darwin and Nietzsche corroded the old faiths and centuries of previous generations. It was Munch's ability to blend the deeply personal with the universal that has made his most celebrated work so enduring, she says.
"The feelings expressed in the painting were extremely subjective on Munch's part," she says. "But because this skull, essentially, has an everyman quality we can all project our feelings onto it."
I don't think this last part is right at all. In the poem, Munch says he "felt the great scream in nature." Well did he or didn't he? Are feelings purely subjective or can they tell us something about the world? To call his feelings 'extremely subjective' seems to me to be an insult to this artist, and a concession to the scientific world-view that sees people as isolated, and only able to know the world through the god of reason.
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Painted in 1895, the painting could also be seen as prophetic of World War I, where technology was able to create mass slaughter on a scale previously unknown. Again, this perspective is unavailable to Prideaux. Jung also had his well-known vision of a blood-soaked Europe shortly before World War I broke out. He came to see this vision as prophetic; Anthony Storr sees that as narcissism on Jung's part, which again is an insult, said presumably because he also lives in a world where prophecy isn't possible.
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Born on 12th December 1863, Munch had North Node in Scorpio. The Node is where we find our greatest fulfillment, and to which we are drawn often without knowing it. Scorpio is ruled by a collective planet (Pluto) and it is the sign par excellence of hidden, instinctive feeling. Munch's planet of artistic feeling, Venus, is also in Scorpio, and opposite Pluto. So this suggests that The Scream is as much about the expression of something raw and instinctive that is hidden beneath the civilised veneer, as it is about collective pain and despair. It is saying look beneath the surface to that which has become inadmissible.
9 comments:
I love the painting.
More or less symbolises me and my plight.
Very good post! Well done!
Today's blog illustrates exactly why you cannot give up blogging and leave us in the lurch! Your blogs are forming a major part of my education – I’m not joking! Please don’t give up. You are incredibly gifted. Your insights are astounding and I, for one, still need you.
I've heard that Jung knew WWII was coming for years before it happened. This was because he was listening to the dreams of his psychotherapy patients who were relating their dreams. Many many patients, who did not know each other, were relating similar dreams that seemed to be about the end of the world. Yes, there are ways of looking at the world that seem more than physical objects located in space and time.
Astrologically, Neptune is the planet of altered states. With Neptune's recent entry into Pisces we can forsee much more respect for artistic visions like those behind "The Scream."
I agree with Debbie. Your insightful approach is worth every second of the time it takes to read your blog.
What I always saw in this painting is the fear everyone has in the face of change, extreme or otherwise, and it is what? --peculiar? curious? -- that it comes up for auction now, at a time when massive change is again underway everywhere. We all face the Great Unknown again, and there is no one at all to hold our frightened hands. (Yes, I majored in art.)
Please do whatever it takes to continue with this column of yours.
We need you.
Yes, interesting The Scream should come up for sale now, when you look at what Greece is going through and what Italy and Spain have still to face.
Great post. This picture has always seemed like a premonition of the gas attacks during WWi to me.
Spot on in your analysis. It is a feeling that also relates to the closing of the era of Piscis, while the view of a new Aquarian era was not so much in the collective unconscious. What you say still holds true today, but it also seems to be fading away in the mist of change and the opening of a new era. Light is shyning on our path, more so now than when EM painted his famous picture of what the astral plane was at the time.
Cheers!
What do you think about today's 'supermoon' and the political troubles in Greece, France and the UK?
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