In The Scream, the figure is not screaming — nature is

The figure has its hands over its ears. It is not making the noise — it is trying to keep the noise out.

Munch said so himself, in a notebook entry written before he painted it: “I was walking along the road with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused and leaned on the fence in utter exhaustion — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

The scream is in the landscape. The figure is the one who can hear it.

What you are actually looking at

A real place. The simplified landscape is the Kristiania fjord — the Oslo fjord — seen from Ekeberg hill, and the two small figures walking away on the left are the friends from the notebook, who kept going while Munch stopped.

The picture began as another painting. In 1892 Munch made Sick Mood at Sunset. Despair, and the National Museum is precise that the colours, format and composition are the same. What changed was the person. In Despair there is a clearly defined man in a hat and coat, seen from the side. In The Scream he has become a schematic face that resists description — and, crucially, he has been turned to face us.

That single rotation is the painting. The museum calls the effect “confrontational and immediately communicative”. A man looking away at a sunset is a mood. A creature looking at you while covering its ears is an accusation.

The museum then asks the questions the figure provokes and refuses to answer any of them: is it a woman or a man, a coat or a dress, a skull or a face, and why has it no hair?

How it was made, and why it looks unfinished

Not oil on canvas. This is tempera and oil crayon on cardboard — a cheap, absorbent support, worked with a stick of grease as much as a brush.

Munch made sketches and worked at the motif over a long period, but the technique and the thin, unfilled areas give an impression of something done fast. That impression is the point: form and content pulled into the same gesture, which the museum identifies as the turn from Symbolism to twentieth-century Expressionism.

There are two curiosities on the object itself. It is signed twice, one signature over the other. And on the reverse there is a rudimentary sketch of the same motif.

There is more than one

Five, in fact, plus a print — which undercuts the idea of a single unrepeatable outburst.

• The National Museum’s painting, 1893 — this one.
• The Munch Museum’s painting, now dated no earlier than 1910.
• Two pastels: one dated 1893, one signed 1895, the latter carrying a version of the prose poem on a panel set into its frame.
• A black-and-white lithograph, 1895.

Which came first was argued over for years. It is now widely agreed the 1893 painting is the earliest of them.

“Can only be painted by a madman”

At the top left, in the red sky, there is a barely legible sentence in pencil: “Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!” — Can only be painted by a madman!

The attribution of that line has flipped twice. It was long claimed to be Munch’s own. Then, by 2008, most Munch scholars had decided somebody else wrote it, on the strength of a review of his 1904 Copenhagen exhibition which reported that “a tactless hand has written in pencil” on the clouds.

Then in 2020, the National Museum and the Munch Museum examined it with an infrared camera and graphological analysis, and concluded it was Munch after all.

So the most famous piece of graffiti in art is the artist’s own annotation of his own picture — and it took a century, and infrared, to establish it.

Reading. You will often read that the blood-red sky records the ash from the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which produced spectacular sunsets over Europe. It is a lovely theory and it is not in the museum’s account of the painting. Munch’s own note describes the sky turning red as an event of the evening he is describing; whether a volcano put it there is a hypothesis about meteorology, not a fact about the picture.

Nobody rushed to buy it

Munch showed it in Berlin in 1893, the year he painted it, under the title Verzweiflung — Despair. The name we use came later.

The National Gallery wanted it in 1901 and could not get it: the committee asked Munch what he wanted for “the picture ‘The Scream’”, and he agreed only not to take it abroad and to give the gallery first refusal — then promptly exhibited it in Berlin, Leipzig, Copenhagen and Prague over the next nine years.

It entered the collection in 1910, when Olaf Schou bought it and immediately gave it away to the museum.

And its fame is younger than people assume. The catalogue notes it was reproduced “only relatively rarely” in the first half of the twentieth century, and that its iconic status has grown steadily since the 1970s. It was last lent abroad in 1993, to Japan. In 1994 it was stolen, and recovered the same year.

What isn’t known

• What the figure is. The museum lists the ambiguities and declines to resolve them.
• Why the sky is red. Described, not explained. See the reading above.
• What Munch meant by it at the time. The first scholarly discussion, in 1894, read it as “the final tableau from a terrible battle between the brain and sex” — an interpretation the museum notes does not match how the picture is understood today, and prints anyway.
• Why it became an icon when it did. The catalogue observes the rise from the 1970s without claiming a cause.

The reading everyone brings to it — a person screaming — is the one thing the evidence rules out. Munch wrote down what he heard, and it was not himself.

Own The Scream in 4K →
See the original at Nasjonalmuseet →