Edvard Munch / The Scream III

Edvard Munch

THE SCREAM III

Edvard Munch / Scream II

Edvard Munch

SCREAM II

Edvard Munch / The Scream I

The Scream by Edvard Munch

THE SCREAM

by Edvard Munch

The Scream (Norwegian: Skrik) is the popular name given to each of four versions of a composition, created as both paintings and pastels, by the Expressionist artist Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1910. Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature) is the title Munch gave to these works, all of which show a figure with an agonized expression against a landscape with a tumultuous orange sky. Arthur Lubow has described The Scream as "an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time."

Munch & van Gogh / So close so far

Munch & van Gogh: so close so far

Mariella Guzzoni

 “Yes, artists perpetuate themselves, passing on the torch, Delacroix to the Impressionists, &c. But is that all?”, van Gogh pondered in a letter to his brother Theo in early August 1888, at thirty-five years old, just before painting theSunflowers. We are in Provence, at the Yellow House, the Studio of the South, the crowning of a dream that would not last.

Years later, Edvard Munch reflects on a van Gogh who “did not allow his flame to go out. Fire and embers were his brushes during the few years of his life, whilst he burned out for his art”. It is October 1933, Munch is seventy years old and for many years he has lived secluded in Ekely, the estate he had bought in 1916, not far from Oslo. “I have thought, and wished, that in the long term, with more money at my disposal, like him, I would not let my flame go out, and with a burning brush paint until the end.”

How Dostoevsky influenced Edvard Munch

APR 19 2019

ALEXANDRA GUZEVA

Ever get the impression that the somber pictures of Munch are ready-made illustrations for the equally somber works of Dostoevsky? We do, and it turns out there’s more to this hunch than meets the eye.

In April, Russia’s first ever major exhibition of one of Norway’s most famous sons, Edvard Munch, opens at the Tretyakov Gallery after several years of negotiations with the Munch Museum in Oslo. Although relatively few of his paintings are known in Russia, Munch’s work has a greater connection with Russia than one might imagine. His idol and inspiration was Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the artist’s most famous piece The Scream looks as if it is possessed by one of Dostoevsky’s demons.

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893

National Gallery of Norway

The director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Zelfira Tregulova, noted that Munch essentially did for art what Dostoevsky did for literature: “He turned the human soul inside out and peered into the abyss and the vortex of passions that rip people apart, revealing the complexity of human nature.”

A short history of mental illness in art

A short history of mental illness in art

From Hogarth to Van Gogh, art has challenged our understanding of mental illness. Jonathan Jones’ shares his top ten for our mental health appeal

Jonathan Jones
Tuesday 13 January 2015 10.52 GMT

Art has led the way in seeing mental illness not as alien or contemptible but part of the human condition – even as a positive and useful experience. Modern art has even celebrated mental suffering as a creative adventure. This psychiatric modernism started with the “madness” of Vincent van Gogh and led to work by patients being discovered as a new kind of art. Yet it has much deeper historical roots. Albrecht Durer portrayed genius as melancholic as early as the Renaissance and Romantic painters identified with the “mad”.

Perhaps it is not hard to see why artists often show empathy for what society calls illness: all creativity is an irrational voyage. The idea of going outside yourself to see things afresh is probably as old as the torchlit visions of cave artists and was expressed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato when he wrote that poetic ecstasy is the only source of divine truth. “Madness is a gift from the gods”, as Plato put it.

1. Vittore Carpaccio – The Healing of the Possessed Man at the Rialto (c. 1496)

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 Painting by Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1460-1525), an Italian painter of the Venetian school, trained in the style of the Vivarini and the Bellini. Photograph: David Lees

This painting of everyday life in 15th century Venice reveals how mental illness was understood and treated in the middle ages. It is sometimes called “The Healing of the Madman”, but “possessed” is closer to contemporary ideas about the mind. For the man being miraculously healed by a priest amidst the human drama of the Rialto bridge has been taken over by a demon. His suffering is neither a medical nor social problem, but a religious experience.

2. Matthias Grunewald – The Temptation of St. Anthony (c. 1512 - 16)

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 The Temptations of Saint Anthony and the Conversation between Saint Anthony and Saint Paul the Hermit, from the Isenheim Altarpiece, by Mathias Grunewald (1475-1528), oil on panel. Photograph: DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images

Late medieval artists were fascinated by the story of the early Christian hermit Saint Anthony the Great who was tempted by devils. For Grunewald, this becomes a truly personal and psychological terror, an image of a man whose sanity is under threat. The infinite horrible shapes of the demons are like malformed thoughts. It is a compassionate work, for this is part of the Isenheim altarpiece, painted for a hospital that treated people with disfiguring illnesses. One of the devils has the sores and grey skin that appear in other parts of the altarpiece and evoke the illnesses treated there. Does this swarming scene therefore portray the threat to mental health posed by extreme physical suffering? It influenced German expressionism and is to this day a masterpiece of the threatened mind.

3. Albrecht Durer – Melancholia (1514)

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 Johan Wierix; after Albrecht Durer, Melancolia. Engraving on paper, Scottish National Gallery. Photograph: Antonia Reeve

This visionary work of art is both a diagnosis and heroic celebration of what might now be seen as illness. Melancholia was known and experienced in the middle ages, a darkness of the mind resulting from an inbalance of the humours. That darkness is marked on the brooding face of Durer’s spirit of melancholy. In her despond, she appears unable to continue with her great works. She is to judge by her tools a mathematician, geometer, and architect: a Renaissance genius. Durer portrays through this emblem his own inner life and intuits the mind’s complexity. For Melancholy in his eyes is the badge of genius - to aspire to know and create is to slump into despair. Unhappiness is noble, for Durer. This print is arguably the beginning of modern psychology.

Edvard Munch / Vampire

Vampire by Edvard Munch.

Edvard Munch's "Vampire"

One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch’s painting of a man locked in a vampire’s tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin – created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago. Some believed the Norwegian artist’s anguished 1894 masterpiece, Love and Pain – since known asVampire – to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite sister. Some years later, Nazi Germany condemned it as morally “degenerate”.

Vampire has become one of Munch’s most sought-after and reproduced images, despite remaining in the hands of a private collector for the past 70 years.

The painting will go on the open market, The Independent can reveal, and is anticipated to smash the $31m (£17m) auction record for a Munch work. Vampire, which is often seen as the sister of The Scream, completed just months earlier, will be sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York for an estimated $35m.

The painting was part of Munch’s seminal 20-work series The Frieze of Life, which included The Scream. It is the most significant version of four Vampires he completed in 1893 and 1894, and was first exhibited in 1902 in Berlin, where his works caused shock and awe.

Vampire was sold to the avid Munch collector, John Anker, in 1903, and is the only work from the original series in private hands. It was acquired by a private collection from Anker and his wife, Nini Roll, in 1934, and has since remained there – albeit loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until last year. Vampire has not been since in Britain since 1974. Simon Shaw, head of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s in New York, said: “There have been past Munch works to be sold in recent times, such as a wonderful group of works in 2006 and a painting earlier this year, but this one is a real, knock ‘em dead masterpiece.”

Vampire caused a sensation when it was unveiled, touching on turn-of-the-century fears about women’s liberation. Some critics were outraged by its perverse, almost sado-masochistic depiction of passion. Mr Shaw added: “It was shocking to Berlin society just as it is shocking today.” Munch, however, always insisted it was nothing more than “just a woman kissing a man on the neck”.

The work also became the basis for several pastels, woodcuts, lithographs and prints, one of which will be sold at Sotheby’s in London on 2 October, entitled Vampire II and estimated to fetch up to £400,000. The painting will be on view in London from 3 to 7 October, and then in Moscow, before it is sold in New York on 3 November.

By Jim McKinniss

THE PHOTO EXCHANGE