III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY
Munch's The Scream
▶ Listen · narrated
Every parody shows the figure screaming. Munch's own account says the opposite: it is covering its ears against a scream it hears in the landscape around it.
At a glance
- Artist
- Edvard Munch
- Date
- 1893
- Medium
- Tempera and pastel on board
- Dimensions
- 91 × 73.5 cm (2 ft 5 in)
- Collection
- National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
Look closer
Hands clamped over the ears, not the mouth
The figure's hands press flat against the sides of its head, covering the ears. The mouth is open, but nothing blocks it. This is the detail that reverses the usual reading: a screaming figure would clutch its throat or chest, or fling its arms wide. Covering the ears is a gesture of defence against sound coming from outside. Munch described hearing an infinite scream passing through nature. The figure in the painting is reacting to that scream, not producing it.
Sky bands echoing the figure's curve
The sky is rendered in thick, horizontal bands of orange, yellow and red that curve and ripple across the upper half of the composition. These bands follow the same undulating rhythm as the figure's rounded skull and shoulders. The landscape is not a neutral backdrop: its forms repeat and amplify the figure's distortion. If the scream is passing through nature, the painting suggests that nature has become the medium for it, carrying the sound in visible waves across the sky.
The rigid diagonal of the bridge rail
A dark diagonal slashes across the lower half of the painting, marking the edge of a bridge or walkway. Unlike every other element in the composition, this line is straight and unyielding. It separates the writhing sky and water from the two small, upright figures in the background, who walk calmly along the same path. The rigidity of the railing emphasises by contrast how far the foreground figure has departed from the ordinary geometry of the scene. It is the only thing that has not begun to scream.
The story
Munch painted four versions of this composition in 1893 and the years immediately following, two in paint and two in pastels, as well as a lithograph. The version in tempera and pastel now in Oslo is the best known. The Norwegian title is Skrik, meaning scream or shriek, and when Munch first exhibited the work in Berlin it carried the German title Der Schrei der Natur: The Scream of Nature. That title is precise about what is screaming. It is not the figure.
Munch's own written account, recorded later, describes walking along a path at sunset. The light turned the clouds blood red. He felt exhausted and ill, and stopped to lean against a railing. Then he sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. The figure in the painting, with its hands pressed over its ears and its mouth open in apparent horror, is hearing that scream. The gesture is defensive, not expressive. The landscape around it has become the source and carrier of a sound the figure cannot shut out.
The composition organises itself around this transmission of sound through space. The sky is not painted as a static sunset but as bands of colour that ripple and curve in thick, horizontal waves. These waves echo the rounded contours of the figure's skull and body, as though the scream that began in the sky has reached the figure and bent it into the same shape. The water below the bridge follows the same rhythm. Only the bridge railing, a single dark diagonal, remains straight. Two small figures in the background walk along the same path, upright and undisturbed. They are too far away to hear what the foreground figure hears, or they are not listening.
Scholars have located the likely spot: a path along the Oslofjord overlooking the city, near where Munch's sister had been committed to an asylum. Various explanations have been proposed for the unnaturally orange sky, including the atmospheric effects of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which produced vivid sunsets across Europe for months, and Munch's own psychological state at the time. None of these explanations has displaced the others. What is certain is that Munch painted the sky as though it were in motion, and that the figure is responding to something it perceives in that motion.
The face has been simplified almost to the point of abstraction: a pale oval with dark voids for eyes and an open mouth, more skull than flesh. This is not a portrait of a particular person but a schema for a human being stripped to its capacity to register horror. The body, too, is reduced: a dark, formless shape that merges with the railing and the bridge. Everything specific has been taken away except the act of hearing and the inability to escape what is heard.
The painting became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century, almost always under the mistaken assumption that the figure is screaming. The misreading is understandable: the open mouth and the distorted face are the visual grammar of a scream in countless other images. But Munch's title and his written account both insist otherwise, and the hands over the ears confirm it. The painting is about a scream that comes from outside the self, from the world, and the self's helplessness before it.
Why it mattered then
Munch made this painting in 1893, at the beginning of what would become the Expressionist movement. The idea that a painting could show not the appearance of things but a subjective, emotional response to them was still new, and controversial. Academic painting in Europe was still dominated by careful observation of the visible world, whether in portraiture, landscape or historical narrative. Munch's generation — which included artists such as Ensor, Hodler and later Kirchner — began to argue that accuracy to inner experience mattered more than accuracy to external appearance. The Scream was first exhibited in Berlin in 1893 as part of a show that caused enough scandal to be closed early. German critics were divided. Some saw Munch as a serious artist exploring new territory; others dismissed the work as incompetent or deranged. The controversy helped establish Munch's reputation, and the painting became a reference point for younger artists who wanted to paint emotion directly, without the mediation of traditional compositional decorum. By the time the Expressionist movement had a name, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Munch's work was already being cited as foundational. The painting also mattered because it gave visual form to a particular kind of modern anxiety: not fear of a specific threat, but a generalised dread with no clear object. The scream comes from nature itself, which means it comes from nowhere and everywhere. This was a recognisable feeling in the 1890s, a period marked by rapid industrialisation, urban growth and the erosion of older certainties about religion and social order. Munch painted a figure alone on a bridge, hearing something the people around it cannot hear, and that isolation became a central theme of modern art.
Why it matters now
The face in The Scream has become a shorthand for existential dread, reproduced so often that it now functions as a cultural emoji. It appears on posters, in advertisements, in Halloween masks, almost always as a symbol of screaming or panic. The ubiquity of the image has made it difficult to see what Munch actually painted, which is not a figure screaming but a figure hearing a scream it cannot escape. The difference matters because the painting is not about self-expression but about helplessness before something external and vast. That reading has become more rather than less relevant. The idea of a scream passing through nature — through the sky, the water, the landscape itself — now carries associations Munch could not have intended but which the painting can accommodate. Environmental anxiety, the sense of living inside a crisis that is everywhere and nowhere, finds an image in Munch's writhing sky and isolated figure. The painting does not need to be updated or reinterpreted to speak to this. It already describes a world in which the natural environment has become a source of dread, and in which the individual response is to cover one's ears and remain standing, because there is nowhere else to go. The painting also remains important as a test case for how images are read and misread. The gap between what Munch said he painted and what most people think they see is a useful reminder that titles, context and the artist's own account all matter, but that they cannot control how an image circulates once it enters public consciousness. The Scream is now two things: the painting Munch made in 1893, and the cultural symbol it became in the century afterwards. Both are real, and they are not quite the same thing.
The surprising detail
Both painted versions of The Scream have been stolen from public museums. The first theft was in 1994, when the version now in the National Museum was taken from the National Gallery in Oslo during the Winter Olympics. The thieves left a note: "Thanks for the poor security." It was recovered several months later. The second theft was in 2004, when armed men entered the Munch Museum in Oslo in daylight and took both a painted version of The Scream and another Munch painting, Madonna, in front of museum visitors. Both were recovered in 2006, though the Scream had suffered some damage. A painting about helplessness before an overwhelming force has twice been taken by force, and twice returned.
Remember this
The figure is not screaming. It is covering its ears against a scream it hears passing through the landscape.
Test yourself
Why does it matter that the two figures in the background are walking calmly while the foreground figure is distorted and frozen?
Because it establishes that the scream is not an objective event that everyone present would perceive equally. The two background figures are on the same bridge, in the same sunset, and they are unaffected. This means the scream is not simply a loud noise in the world but something the foreground figure perceives alone, whether as a psychological state or as a heightened sensitivity to something others do not notice. The painting becomes a study of isolation: not physical isolation, since other people are present, but perceptual isolation. The foreground figure is trapped inside an experience it cannot share and cannot escape, while ordinary life continues a few metres away. That gap between the two registers of experience — one distorted and overwhelmed, the other upright and indifferent — is what makes the painting unsettling rather than simply expressive.
Go deeper
Image: Edvard Munch, Public domain. Licence: Public domain. Source.