Echoes of Despair: Exploring Munch’s Art.

How tortured minds have the most scenic creativity.

One Evening I was walking along the path, the city was on one side and the fjord below I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord, the sun was setting and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a ‘Scream’ passing through nature; it seemed to me that i heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked. This became the SCREAM.

The Scream came to be in the moment when Munch felt an acute sense of anguish. It was almost palpable, like in the air and if you look close enough you can feel it too.

In his diary entry marked January 22, 1892 he wrote, as he was walking with his two friends on a fjord overlooking a sunset ; He felt a gust of melancholy and noticed a sudden change in the sky, almost ominous and he leaned onto the fence with exhaustion.

What he saw above the blue-black fjord in the sky he described as “Blood and tongues of fire”. As his friends walked on, he wrote “ I stood there trembling with anxiety and I sensed an infinite scream pass through nature”.

Regarding this painting, he first depicted with a more recognisable human subject, But eventually he gave into art nouveau characterised by dramatically flowing lines and abstracted symbolism. The eerie visage of the figure looking directly at us creeps into our gaze and never leaves.

According to Munch’s description, many interpret the figure reacting to a shriek rather than producing it.

He eventually made four versions of “The scream” and he created numerous prints and lithographs.On his first version though, he added a subtle wry inscription -“Could only have been painted by a mad man”.

His paintings, that regularly came out express how affected he was by depression and traumatised by the constant experience of death, He lost his mother when he was five, his sister at thirteen, Both to tuberculosis. He also lost another sister, who was diagnosed with mental illness and was kept in a sanatorium for a long time.

Anguish, Melancholy, Fear, Death and Pain are the core topics of his artworks. We can often see shadows and rings of color around his figures in the paintings, that emphasize an aura of fear, pain, menace and death.

“Sickness, Insanity and death were the dark angels standing guard at my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.”

After his mother passed away, Munch spent much of his time or formative years as we can call it with his father. His father's oppressive and religiously fanatic temperament, on top of his own poor health in a way made passage for him to develop a nightmarish artistic vision.

Growing up he was invariably surrounded by sickness, madness and death. Munch’s life was deeply troubled. He deliberately avoided seeking help for his depression or alcohol addiction because he thought any sort of treatment would kill the urgency or passion that drove him to his work.He wanted his paintings to be a medium through which he would process and understand psychological conflicts.

How he feared of life and his illness are both intertwined with his identity, if you removed this off his life, it in turn would lead to the destruction of his art.

Edward Munch was a tortured artist and we know it through his paintings; melancholic and grief-flooded. No other art piece exemplifies it better than Munch’s The Dead Mother.

In the painting we see a deathbed scene. In the background, we see a woman lying on the bed pale as a ghost, while there are other members also in dark clothes, Presumably the family members or the mourners, crowd around her. The main focus though, is on the girl in the foreground with her hands on her ears, dishevelled with an expression of abject horror on her face.

The Dead Mother expresses total destruction, verging on madness. Despite having all those members swarm the room, the girl in the blood red dress seems lonely and carrying out the act of grieving all by herself with none to look after her.

One idea that we can see Munch returning to very often is “ Dead Mother”, throughout his artistic life. He executed several paintings and other drawings on the same subject. It was almost like Munch never got over the loss of his mother.

Twenty-five years after his mother Laura Munch’s death, her son remained haunted by her loss. Many art historians believe that Munch’s paintings of Dead mothers draw heavily from his own personal experience of loss.

Many agree that the child in the foreground represents Munch’s own psychological anguish. Noting that the child in the painting stands alone, cast adrift by this tragic loss ; this might depict Munch’s own abandoned and lonely childhood and the lack of emotional support from his father.

The painting is grounded in personal pain. Munch represented it in a very unsettling manner. These two paintings “The Scream” and “The Dead Mother” are archetypal examples of a grief-ridden and isolated psyche, beautifully painted to depict loss and innocence.