The Scream Explained: Is the Figure Actually Screaming?
Munch's The Scream through his diary, the red sky, the bridge, the repeated versions, and the handwritten inscription. Is the figure screaming or hearing it?
The central figure’s open mouth makes The Scream look like an image of someone crying out. Munch’s diary describes something less stable: while walking, he saw the sky turn blood-red and felt a great scream passing through nature. The hands may be blocking the ears. Is the figure producing the sound or receiving it? The painting holds both possibilities.
Essential facts about The Scream
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Edvard Munch |
| Date | 1893 |
| Medium | Tempera and crayon on unprimed cardboard |
| Dimensions | 91 × 73.5 cm |
| Collection | National Museum of Norway, Oslo |
| Context | A motif within Munch’s Frieze of Life project |
The famous 1893 version is not oil on canvas. Munch used tempera and crayon on unprimed cardboard. Because the support and colors are sensitive to light, the National Museum displays it under subdued illumination.
Munch gathered works about love, illness, anxiety, and death under the idea of the Frieze of Life. The Scream was not only the record of one feeling. He returned to its motif in prose, drawings, paintings, pastels, and prints.
Is the figure screaming, or hearing nature scream?
In a diary entry dated 22 January 1892, Munch recalled walking with two friends as the sun set. The sky turned blood-red, his friends continued, and he stood trembling with anxiety while sensing a great, endless scream pass through nature.
The painted figure opens its mouth and presses both hands to its head. The gesture can be read as a cry, but also as an attempt to cover the ears. MUNCH notes that the image does not settle whether the figure actively screams or reacts to the scream.
The diary and painting align most closely when the sound belongs to the whole scene. Figure, water, hills, and sky bend into related waves, as if sensation has changed the landscape’s structure.
The bridge’s straight lines cut through the figure and landscape
Nearly everything around the central figure curves. The head, hands, body, shore, water, and sky repeat a wavering contour. The bridge does the opposite: its railing runs as a hard diagonal into depth.
Two companions continue along that perspective system. Their bodies remain upright and comparatively ordinary. The central figure has dropped out of their geometric world and into the surrounding waves.
This is why the painting communicates isolation without placing the subject physically alone. Other people are present, but their space no longer matches the figure’s experience.
Is the blood-red sky a real event or a psychological image?
Munch based the setting on a road above Oslo with a view toward the fjord. The diary gives a real sunset as the trigger, and several natural explanations for an unusually red sky have been proposed.
No natural explanation can by itself account for the painting. The orange and red bands repeat the figure’s curves and intensify the diary’s language. Observed sunset and subjective fear are not alternatives here; an external event is reorganized to carry an internal state.
It is safest to say that the red sky begins with remembered perception and functions as an expressive construction. Claims about one exact atmospheric cause remain hypotheses unless tied to stronger evidence.
How many versions of The Scream are there?
| Date | Medium | Location | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1893 | Tempera and crayon | National Museum | Generally considered the first painted version |
| 1893 | Multicolored crayon | MUNCH | Drawn version |
| 1895 | Pastel | Private collection | Frame bears Munch’s prose text |
| c. 1910 | Tempera and oil | MUNCH | Probably made so Munch could retain a version |
| 1895 | Lithograph | Multiple collections | Black-and-white print; about 30 impressions are thought to survive |
There are four principal colored versions: two from 1893, one from 1895, and one around 1910. Munch also made an 1895 lithograph, allowing the image to circulate in multiple impressions.
The answer changes if “versions” includes drawings, printing stones, or individual impressions. State what is being counted. Four is the useful answer for the major colored works; the motif exists in more objects.
Munch wrote the faint “madman” inscription himself
The National Museum’s painted version has a faint pencil sentence near the upper left: “Can only have been painted by a madman.” The line was once suspected to be vandalism.
Infrared photography and comparison with Munch’s handwriting led the museum to conclude that Munch wrote it. The inscription likely responds to public remarks about the work and the artist’s mental state.
This finding changes its status from an attack added by a stranger to evidence of Munch internalizing—or bitterly quoting—the judgment directed at him. It does not tell us to diagnose the painting or the artist.
A sequence for looking at The Scream
- Follow the bridge railing from the foreground into depth
- Compare the companions’ upright bodies with the central figure
- Trace one curve from the head into water, hill, and sky
- Decide whether the hands look more like projection or protection
- Find the faint inscription without letting it dominate the image
- Compare two versions and notice how changes in medium alter urgency
For another work whose count depends on what qualifies as a version, see how many Sunflowers Van Gogh painted. To carry the same attention to line, color, and bodily response into nonfigurative work, use the seven-minute guide to looking at abstract art.
Collection and research sources
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