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Edvard Munch The Scream Analysis

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Toward the end of the 19TH century, S. Freud, a renowned psychiatrist, was investigating unconscious phenomena and the influence of childhood events on the causation of neurosis. At about the same time, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863- 1944) began to express his inner world through his artistic creations, giving birth to an exceptional art style which would later be known as Expressionism. Edvard Munch’s mother premature death from tuberculosis, was one of the most painful event in his life. She died in 1868, leaving Edvard, who was five, his three sisters and younger brother in the care of her much older husband, Christian, a doctor imbued with a religiosity that often darkened into gloomy fanaticism. Several years later, the death …show more content…

The paintings bore such titles as Jelaously, Despair, Anxiety, Puberty, Melancholy, Death in the Sickroom, and anthology The Scream, which he painted in 1893. Munch’s ‘ The Scream’ is a Mona Lisa for our time, an icon of modern art. As Leonardo da Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and the values of Humanism, Munch defined our own age and how we see it- wracked with uncertainty and anxiety. It stands among an exclusive group, including Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Matisse’s Red Studio, comprising the essential works of modernist experiment and lasting …show more content…

She was the wealthy daughter of Kristiania’s leading wine merchant, and at the 29, she was still unmarried. He first set eyes on Tulla Larsen when she arrived at his studio in the company of an artist with whom he share the space. From the outset, she persuaded him aggressively. In his telling, their affair began almost against his will. He fled to Berlin, and that across the Europe-she followed him. He would refuse to see her, then succumb. Reconstruction of their tormented relationship has relied on Munch sometimes conflicting but far from disinterested accounts. The Dance of Life ( 1899-1900), a homage of their relationship, set on midsummer’s night in Aasgaardstrand, the seaside village where he was with Millie Thaulow, and where he had a tiny cottage. A vacant-eyed male character, at the center of the painting, representing Munch himself, dances with a woman in red dress- probably Millie. Their stiff bodies maintain an unhappy distance, and their eyes do not meet. Tulla Larsen can be seen to the left, in a white dress, golden-haired, smiling benevolently. She appears again on the right side, but this time in a black dress; her countenance as dark as her dress with her eyes downcast in bleak

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