The Scream July 2025
Few paintings have entered the collective consciousness as profoundly as ‘The Scream’. With its swirling sky, distorted figure, and bridge suspended over emptiness, Edvard Munch’s most iconic work captures more than just a moment of personal anguish — it embodies the psychic trembling of an entire age, the late 19th century, marked by rapid industrialisation, urbanisation, and existential despair. Yet, behind the scream lies not only dread but a specific night, a walk, a sky, and a life shaped by grief, desire, and emotional fracture.

To understand ‘The Scream’ is not to decode it as a symbol but to feel it as a wound. It is not an abstraction — it is a confession. This essay traces that wound to its source: a man who saw the sky catch fire and felt the world fall silent. A man haunted by illness, religion, loss, and women he could neither fully possess nor escape. It begins with a sunset over Oslofjord and ends with a scream that never quite fades. It echoes inside me now, and I cannot help but feel the empathy it evokes and the compassion I need for myself. Life rarely reveals itself in only black or white — usually only when someone refuses to acknowledge the nuances and prefers to see everything through a murky filter.

“Shades Between

They said the world was black or white,
a tale of wrong and flawless right.
But I have walked where colours fade,
and shadows dance in light and shade.

A glance, a word, a twist of fate—
Not all is love, not all is hate.
The heart’s not split in two clean parts;
It lives in grey, it breaks in arts.

The ones who judge with a sharpened eye
will miss the soft and trembling sky.
For life is made of threads that weave
both truth and lies, we choose to grieve.

So let them preach in black or white—
I’ll find my path in softer light.
Where flaws are grace, and scars are signs
that life was lived between the lines.”
Malmö July 2025

The Blood-Red Moment

When someone unexpectedly stabs you in the chest – or worse, in the back – when you feel ignored or misunderstood, it's easy for everything to fall apart just as it did for Edvard Munch. And for me.

The contrast between idyllic images, such as Carl Larsson’s ‘Sundborn’, where a woman in a red chair turns her back to the world while a child feeds a teddy bear in a blueberry forest, and Munch’s ‘The Scream’ is striking. The peaceful scenes of Larsson's work only serve to highlight the intense emotional turmoil depicted in Munch's painting.

There are moments in a person’s life that mark the soul like a scar, not because of what happens explicitly, but because of how the world suddenly shifts before one’s eyes. The trigger can be a single event or a combination of several. So it is with the first of July for me – even though the date is a long story spread over many years, perhaps a whole lifetime. The outcome remains the same. This sense of emotional upheaval and the resulting scars are not unique to Munch, but are part of the shared human experience.

For Edvard Munch, such a moment came during an evening walk along Ekeberg Ridge in Kristiania in January 1892. He was walking with two friends as the sun set over the Oslo fjord. In his diary, he described how the sky turned into a burning blood-red glow, and how he was suddenly overwhelmed by a dizzying sense of anxiety. The friends continued walking, but Munch stopped, grabbed a railing, and felt a great scream pierce through the natural world. It wasn’t a scream he heard with his ears – it was a cosmic howl that sliced through existence and left him cold-sweated and paralysed, a feeling that many of us, at some point in our lives, can relate to. This shared experience of overwhelming anxiety and fear is what makes Munch's work so universally resonant.

“I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—I felt a touch of melancholy—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I stopped, leaned against the fence, dead tired—over the blue-black fjord and the city lay blood and tongues of fire—my friends continued walking—I stood there trembling with fear—and I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature.”

This very moment, captured in the words of his diary, became the seed of the most iconic work in Nordic art history. In ‘The Scream’, he returns to the place, to the railing, to the fjord, to the burning sky. The distorted figure in the foreground—genderless, skinless, mouth wide in terror—is both a representation of himself and a human archetype. And behind it, nature explodes in red, orange, and violet. Some researchers claim it was an aurora borealis he saw. In contrast, others suggest that the sky still bore traces of Krakatoa’s volcanic ash cloud, which, for several years after the 1883 eruption, tinted sunsets worldwide in unnatural hues. But what Munch saw mattered less than what he experienced: the world shifted from reality to vision, from the familiar to the infinitely terrifying.

That is what makes ‘The Scream’ so immediate and so timeless. It is not a planned symbolist manifesto. It is the depiction of a real moment—an account from the border between human and nature, between psychological collapse and poetic clarity. Munch did not merely scream—he captured the instant when existence itself began to shout back. That’s also why the painting isn’t just about personal anxiety, but a kind of cosmic, existential panic, a theme that resonates with us all, where all of nature, including each one of us, screams.

Anxiety, Women, and Art

Edvard Munch’s iconic painting is more than just a work of art – it is a psychological document, a primal scream captured on canvas. The twisted figure with hands around its face, the burning sky, the swaying bridge: everything vibrates with anxiety, fear, and existential dissolution – a panic attack. It wasn’t an individual screaming – it was existence itself, a portrayal that draws us in with its overwhelming emotional intensity. This painting is not just a visual representation, but a profound insight into the human psyche.

Behind the painting lies a life steeped in illness, loss, and emotional instability. Munch’s mother died when he was five. His beloved sister Sophie died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen. The father, a religiously rigid military doctor, tried to restrain the children’s grief with prayer and fear, which only deepened Edvard’s sense of guilt and dread. Yet another sister, Laura, later fell ill with schizophrenia. Munch grew up with death as a constant companion, and psychiatric institutions were never far away, neither in his family nor in his mind.

It is no coincidence that ‘The Scream’ was painted near a place where there was a mental hospital. Munch often described how, during that very walk, he felt nature’s scream pierce him, as if the landscape itself shared his anxiety. The intense colour scale and undulating lines visualise a psychological breakdown. It is a painting that lacks comfort or reconciling words. It doesn’t ask for understanding, nor does it provide an explanation. It just screams.

Munch’s relationships with women, particularly Dagny Juel, were not just influential but also tragic, contributing significantly to his emotional turmoil. In the decadent artistic scene of Berlin during the 1890s, he encountered the Norwegian writer and model Dagny Juel, a free spirit who inspired many artists, including Strindberg. Her untimely and tragic death in Georgia in 1901, when a jealous lover shot her, left an indelible mark on Munch’s psyche. Although their relationship was not strictly romantic, she seems to have become a symbol of dangerous femininity – seductive, inspiring, yet also deadly.

The most damaging relationship, however, was with Tulla Larsen. They met in 1898, and she quickly became obsessed with him. He, in turn, seemed both attracted and frightened. Their relationship was characterised by control, jealousy, and emotional outbursts. On one occasion, when she attempted to force a marriage, Munch withdrew, and they ended up in a violent quarrel that resulted in him shooting himself in the hand. The incident haunted him for a long time, and his art became even more infused with threatening eroticism and destructive gender roles.

Munch’s artistic universe revolves around three themes: love, anxiety, and death. The series ‘Frieze of Life’ includes works such as ‘The Kiss’, ‘Madonna’, ‘Separation’, and Anxiety’ – all variations on the same theme: passion leading to loss, desire resulting in powerlessness, closeness transforming into loneliness. The woman in Munch’s work often embodies dual personalities, representing both the goddess and the destroyer. Female sexuality is charged with danger. The man is usually passive, tormented, and overwhelmed.

‘The Scream’ is arguably the most gender-neutral work in his frieze – the figure in the painting is androgynous, genderless, an empty shell in which anxiety takes form. But within the context of Munch’s other works and his biography, it becomes clear that this anxiety is not solely existential. It is also gendered, visceral, and personal. ‘The Scream’ represents the culmination of a lifelong struggle with loss, desire, guilt, and fear.

That Munch, later in life, sought psychotherapeutic help and was treated at a sanatorium is a testament to the intensity of his inner conflicts. However, it also underscores his honesty as an artist. He did not paint ideals or beauty. He painted the wounded, the screaming, the unspeakable. In ‘The Scream’, he discovered a universal language for the anxiety that resides within every human being, regardless of time, place, or gender. This universality of his art makes it deeply relatable to all who encounter it.

There is no direct model for ‘The Scream’, but several women – notably Dagny Juel and Tulla Larsen – served as emotional catalysts for Munch’s deepest feelings. Their influence is evident throughout his entire body of work, including ‘The Scream’. This iconic painting carries their shadows, not as portraits, but as ghosts of an inner conflict between desire and fear, life and dissolution. The androgynous figure in the painting is genderless, almost ghostlike, and has been interpreted as a symbol of Munch’s internal struggle with both the woman and the feminine within himself. The open mouth, the sunken cheeks, and the undulating lines resemble a scream – but also a cry for help. And presently – I hear my own.