There are paintings you admire for the skill of the artist.
And then there are paintings that seem to get inside your head.
The Scream is one of them.
Created by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, the image has become so familiar that it’s easy to forget just how strange and unsettling it must once have appeared.
A figure stands on a bridge, hands pressed against its face, mouth open, while the landscape behind seems to twist and ripple beneath a blood-red sky.
It looks almost like a nightmare.
And that was rather the point.
Munch wasn’t attempting to paint the world exactly as it appeared. He was interested in something much more difficult to capture — how the world feels.
Born in Norway in 1863, Munch’s early life was marked by illness and death. His mother died when he was five and his sister Sophie died from tuberculosis when he was fourteen. Those experiences would influence his work throughout his life.
Rather than producing conventional portraits and landscapes, Munch increasingly explored anxiety, loneliness, love, jealousy, illness and death.
Then came the experience that inspired The Scream.
Munch later described walking with two friends as the sun was setting. He suddenly felt overwhelmed by anxiety. The sky appeared blood red and he sensed what he described as an enormous, endless scream passing through nature.
His friends carried on walking.
Munch stopped.
That moment eventually became one of the most recognisable images in art.
Interestingly, there isn’t simply one Scream. Munch returned to the subject several times, producing painted, pastel and printed versions. The best-known painted version dates from 1893.
And the screaming figure isn’t necessarily screaming at all.
One interpretation is that the figure is actually hearing the scream — covering its ears as the world around it seems to vibrate with the sound.
More than 130 years later, the picture has lost none of its power.
Turn Your Television Into a Gallery
The Scream is now part of The Gallery on RODtv, our collection designed to turn the biggest screen in your home into something rather more interesting than a large black rectangle.
Instead of leaving the television switched off when you’re not watching a programme, The Gallery allows it to become part of the room.
Put The Scream on the screen and suddenly you have one of the world’s most recognisable works of art dominating the wall.
It’s particularly effective when friends come round, during drinks or at a dinner party. Leave The Gallery running quietly in the background and the television becomes a changing exhibition of remarkable images rather than the thing everyone is trying not to watch.
And The Scream has another advantage.
Someone will almost certainly start talking about it.
THE GALLERY: THE SCREAM
Edvard Munch’s extraordinary masterpiece is now showing as part of The Gallery on RODtv.
Sometimes the best thing to watch on television isn’t television at all.
