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| The Scream, lithograph, Edvard Munch |
Edvard Munch: Love and Angst, at the British Museum from April, will explore the Norwegian’s expression of complex, often fraught, human emotions. At a time when Monet was painting landscapes, Munch was depicting love and desire but also jealousy, loneliness, anxiety, grief and mental instability – most memorably in The Scream.
The version being displayed at the British Museum is a black and white print, which followed a painting and two drawings of the image, but is the image that was disseminated widely during his lifetime and made him famous.
Describing the timeless relevance of The Scream, the exhibition curator, Giulia Bartrum, said: “The emotional impact is incredibly important. Munch was deeply, deeply aware of mental instability, mental illness, a huge subject at the time, and that’s what he was trying to portray. Anything which tries to express the inner workings of the mind … has huge resonance today.”
The Scream will be shown in the Anxiety and Separation section of the exhibition, which will also include a drawing, Despair, itself associated with Munch’s most famous work. Despair shows a figure turned away to look down into the fjords, which Bartrum said showed “perhaps the moment just before felt he heard the scream pass through nature”.
In accompanying text, Munch wrote of the blood red sky, also depicted in The Scream, and how the feeling of the moment resonated around the valley and in his head.
The same section also includes two versions of Angst, showing blank white faces streaming down Karl Johans Gate, Oslo’s busiest street, images Bartrum said would resonate with anyone who has felt lonely in London.
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