When you used Google on the 12 - 13 December, you could see one of the most important and weelknown works in art history - "The Scream", by Edvard Munch, to honor the artist, who was born on the 12th of December 1863 in Lotten, Norway.
A strange, distorted, sinister figured, pictured on a bridge, seems to be screaming, terrified by the horror of everyday angst. The background is a bloody, apocaliptical sunset, which transforms the fjords of Norway into a world of loneliness and angst.
Inspired mostly by his won tragedies (he lost his parents, a sister and a brother to tuberculosis), Munch painted four versions of this paintings, the most famous being on cardboard. Munch would eventually produce a litography of the work, in order to offer the magazines from all over the world the chance to cheaply reproduce his masterpiece.
According to critics and art historians, Munch tried to offer in this composition the very essence of his art, in order to escape his anxiety and obssesions, which would later commit him to a mental institution. He had the idea during a walk near a fjord, accompagned by two friends. There he stopped for a few minutes to rest, as his friends continued on their way. Left alone, basking in the sinister sunset, he had an anxiety attack, during which he swore he could hear the nature crying and then screaming with a terrible intensity, that left him shaking.
The strange main character has been inspired most likely by a mummy that Munch saw in 1889 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
December 2006
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