A solitary figure stands alone on a bridge, cradles his skull shaped head with wiry hands, and lets out a harrowing scream. What was Munch’s inspiration behind this distressing painting and what did he want to convey? The subject is being smothered by swirling strokes of paint to the extent that he almost seems to become one with the background in a chilling instance of possible dissociation. The aggressive orange and yellow waves of paint that denote the sky create the impression that the very canvas itself is bleeding. This painting can be linked to a particular passage in Munch’s diary written in Nice, Frnace on January 22nd in the year 1892. “I was walking along the road with two friends- the sun went down- I felt a gust of melancholy -suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped leaned on the railing, tired to death- as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city- my friends went on, I stood there trembling with anxiety and I felt a vast infinite scream tear through nature.” These words intensify the emotional turmoil of the painted subject, who appears to be morphing into an alien like creature before our very eyes. This painting is haunting and chilling in its ability to express such intensity of emotion through purely visual forms. The feelings of hopelessness, desperation, existential anxiety, and horror that it invokes is unsettling and foreign and yet at the same time all to relatable.
