There are statements that thunder non-stop: “You should no longer paint interiors with men reading and women doing socks. It must be living human beings, who breathe, feel, suffer and love ”. He wrote it in his Edvard Munch diaries in the late 19th century, while blackening the birth of the portrait of the modern human being on white. The Norwegian painter fled from creative conventions, but accepted and encouraged the construction of the myth of "tormented and depressive" painter. This is what the historian Jay A. Clarke, expert in the work of the artist who in 1893 painted The Scream , believes and will be seen in the future National Museum of Norway, which will open its doors in 2021. The legend was reinforced by the fascination before his multiple photos of suffering existence, which emphasize his emotional imbalance and his artistic isolation. The most recent chronicles continue calling him "cursed and blessed crazy", to underline a facet that has overshadowed his own work. Hundreds of private letters attest that he was far from crazy. "The artist adjusted his emotional tone at precise times in order to achieve the results he wanted," says Clarke of this character under construction.
He is the favorite painter of the British artist Tracey Emin, who claims to be "in love" with him since his adolescence, attracted by his plastic expressionism and his concern for the complexity of the human psyche. The Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Munch Museum in Oslo were planning to tell - at an exhibition due to open next November - how Munch has been a constant inspiration in Emin's artistic skills. "His mother died when he was very young. I want to give him a mother, ”the artist told The Guardian in the presentation of a monumental bronze sculpture nine meters high and 15 tons in weight that rests at the entrance of the Oslo museum and represents the absent mother, with a son in his arms.
A year ago we learned that the scream, actually. it's a scare. Giulia Bartrum, head of German painting and drawing at the British Museum, found a lithograph of the painting, with an inscription that says: "I felt a great cry in all of nature." For the specialist, this is the proof that clarifies that one of the most popular paintings in history "represents a person who hears a scare and not, as many people continue to assume and debate, a person who screams," she explained in her day. to the British newspaper The Telegraph . Munch, a reader of his contemporaries Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, wrote in his diary on January 22, 1892, something that confirms this idea. A year before painting the hysteria icon - on a cardboard, with oil, tempera and pastel - he noted that he was walking with two friends on the road, while the sun was setting. "I felt an air of melancholy. Suddenly, the sky turned red as blood. I stopped, leaned against the fence, mortally tired. Blood and tongues of fire fell on the black and blue fjord and the town. My friends kept walking. I stood there, trembling with fear and felt a huge, infinite scream, go through nature. The shudder of what lies ahead.
Virtual visit: The Scream (1893), by Edvard Munch, kept in the National Museum of Oslo (Norway).