The Cry of the Nature or a Picture of the Soul?

The Cry of the Nature or a Picture of the Soul

This is an analysis of Edvard Munch's famous painting Skriet, The Cry, which exist in several variants and the most famous of them is located in Natsjonalgalleriet in Oslo. Death and its vicinity is considered to have had a major influence on Edvard Munch art and it can be seen even in The Cry. The Cry is an anxiety painting, and many have tried to analyze it, especially psychologists. Edvard Munch's own notes have been to some help. I my self see the painting as a an expression of a fear of being insane and afterwards Munch actually got a nervous breakdown and was lying in a hospital in Copenhagen. The Cry is a subjective image of the soul's landscape based on Munch's experience at sunset one evening in Kristiania. He sees the red sky as blood and the deformed figure is located in the middle, where nature's dynamic forces clashed with bronze artificial stability. God's watchful, punitive eye, that has been interpreted as a metaphor for the artist's own superego, can be seen in the middle of the blue-red Heaven. People use to see the picture as an expression of existential anxiety and human vulnerability. I am more inclined to see The Cry as a picture of the pathological anxiety. 

The Cry is probably one of the most analyzed paintings, particularly interesting in psychology circles because, like many of Munch's paintings, it is considered to be a symbolic image of the artist's psyche. 
If you see the painting as the artist's descriptive soul you have interpreted it from the symptomatic perspective. One can also see art as a communication tool. Art is meant to be a tool of communication and we understand the work but maybe we have misunderstood what the artist wants to say (Hermern, 1995). These are the forms of interpretation which I will make an attempt later. Paul Klee (quoted in Hermern, 1995) once said that art does not reproduce what is visible, but learns us to see (the invisible). This is probably true in the case of Munch's paintings. You should still remember that there are no objective truths in this area. 

I will first briefly present the artist and his life in order to then move on and describe The cry, the painting and in the discussion section I am going to try to analyze it in relation to the psychical condition of Munch.

The interesting thing, however is, that the painting itself is able to raise a feeling of anguish by the colors used.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was born in a family with five children. Both parents were deeply religious, even if the father's religiosity changed character to the manic-depressive after his wife's death (Bjerke, 1995). Edvard was the second oldest of the children. His mother died of tuberculosis when Edvard was five years old. Ten years later his eldest sister died in the same disease and later another of his sisters became mentally ill. Both his father and one brother died when Edvard was young. Death and its vicinity throughout childhood and adolescence is considered to have influenced his whole life and thus became the main theme in his works. According to Bjerke (1995) Munch struggled throughout his youth between two poles: the home Christian faith and the bohemian atheism. Perhaps he was just an astute observer, without taking part at all. 

"[An] anxiety haunts the work of Edvard Munch, [that] is expressed with a formal inventiveness that impinges upon the emotions before we are even aware of the subject, the deeper regions of the psyche are assessable only through the potent agency of rhythm and color. " 
According to the author of this text, Munch paintings raise anxiety or other deeper feelings only by a color experience. 
Munch himself was aware of his existential drama, "My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? Why there was a cursor on my cradle? Why did I come to the world without any choice? My art gives meaning to my life. " 
This says a lot about Edvard Munch and his works and he has in his art managed to capture the human psyche and mostly its darkest sides. 

When painting an expressionistic painting the artist is not trying to describe the objective reality but the subjective emotion and the response occurs in human beings (artist) because of different events. Expressionistic artists began to be known during the first decades of the 1900s and Edvard Munch is considered one of the ground breakers. 


"Skriet" (The Scream, The Cry) is considered as the most famous of the paintings of Edvard Munch, and it is also seen as an image of existential anguish. Skriet is named after later analysis. It exists in several variants, the most famous is located in Natsjonalgalleriet in Oslo. 
It is painted in oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard. Size 91 x 73.5 cm. According to Heller (1995) Munch wanted to find a way to describe the psychological reality, reality that was more real to him than the visual world which is continuously changed in his subjective gaze. Between 1892-1893, he repeatedly spoke of his experience, under certain mental conditions, when the clouds were like blood. Therefore he thought that he could not paint the clouds as they are in reality but as they look like in his internal reality, ie. coagulated blood (Heller, 1995). Munch decided to paint after his psychotic visions and painted The Cry. 

The painting is divided into three different parts or domains: the sky in the background (dynamic), the sea in the middle (calm) and the bridge at the front, with its abrupt perspective and a sense of strength. Two characters calmly going along the bridge, away from the central figure. On that we are adopted to identify ourselves with, and most of us do, with the figure in the middle, at its principal place where the curves and the straight lines meet. The figure is so deformed that it does not look like human. It looks SICKLY gaunt and haggard, it is dressed in a bluish color and has a gaping mouth, screaming out. The sky is (blood) red, the water is dirty yellow. You can distinguish boats at the background, otherwise it would be difficult to recognize the yellow thing as water at all. The figure is positioned so that Munch could develop the large undulating curve, in addition to the rack, sharp diagonal, the main elements of composition. The curve in the sky, in blood red stripes to the right, where it turns into blue and green waves and falls down towards the figure's form. 

The Cry is considered as one of the main works of Munch. It is the culmination of his intense period of searching for the very foundation of his art (Wittlich, 1987). The painting was painted after a recast of "Despair". The things changed in The Cry; the central figure has been reversed in the front, towards the viewer and its wild character expresses panic and nightmarish horror. In Despair you can see lonely figure against the railing looking down in the deep instead of observing the color-play in the sky. 
The Cry is regarded as an expression of the modern man's anxiety-laden existence. The screaming figure has a bare head resembling a skull and that seems to be the center of the composition. The head is located between the curves and straight angle, between motion and stability. There is a tension in the painting kept by bronze extremely straight edges and the colorful lines of heaven.

The actual figure, by its form, seems to be connected with nature. But nature can be seen as fusing in to the figure because it takes up the scream of the figure in the colors. The bridge is not a part of nature and then we can interpret it as a tension; "one-man-against-nature" atmosphere. 
Wittlich (1987) sees the blood-red sky as a problem because we do not know if the clouds are meant to be "blood" or if they will be "blood". You can also see a kind of eye in the colorful hurricane above the figure. 
According to Bjerke (1995) The Cry is a picture of "lasted condition" and the image can not be divided into internal and external but it must be seen as a whole. There is an inscription engraved in painting upper red box: "Can only be painted by an insane." It is not clear that the endorsement was written by Munch himself but however, he considered the image constitute a limit to the expression of mental stress (Wittlich, 1987). 

Jeg gik bortover veien med to venner - solen gik ned

- Jeg flte som et pust af vemod -

- Himmeln blev pludsenlig blodi rd

Jeg stanset, laenede mig til gjaerdet traet til dden [mine venner s p mig

og gick videre - ] s utover [p] over de flammende skyer som blod og

svaert [over fjorden og byen] over den blsvarte fjord og by -

Mine venner gik videre - Jeg stod der skaelvende af angst - og jeg flte

som et stort uenderlig skrik gjennem naturen.

Munch wrote these lines in his diary during the illness when when he was staying in Nice January 22, 1892 (Bischoff, 1990, Eggum, 1989, Heller, 1973, p. 103). According to Bjerke (1995) you still have to remember that Munch with these lines referenced to a previous painting, Mood at sundown. 
According Wittlich (1987) the text is based on a real experience that occurred the autumn 1891, when Munch saw a strange Nordic meteorological phenomena that has often been described by the romantic landscape painters.

According to the same author the first result of the phenomena is to be seen in Despair, a painting Munch painted in the winter of 1892. It was at the time, Munch's sister Laura became insane and were in a hospital in Oslo.

According to Wittlich (1987) Munch was afraid that even his own despair was going to be turned into madness and that is why you have to see the painting as the disturbed mans compressed expression of fear. The sole figure, which supports itself against the railing, looking down into the deep below, instead of observing the colors in the sky. Wittlich (1987) means that important thing is the delineation of the main figure and the "friends": Munch's entire artistic situation is lurking there. 
The landscape Despair shown in Kristiania, seen from Ekeberg.

In The Cry Munch has transformed the landscape as much as possible, without interpreting it as a free abstract painting. According to his own words "an extract of nature - the square root of nature caught him " (Eggum, 1989, p.50). 
Munch had seen this natural phenomenon in 1891. A year later he painted Despair while he clearly was already unstable. Another year later he painted The Cry. It was the same year his sister became mentally ill, and before that had Munch himself been in a hospital (for a nervous breakdown?).

Munch has written a lot of in his diaries and his words have been helpful when interpreting his paintings. There are those who think he did it deliberately, to make room for different interpretations. Heller (1973) believes that when Munch chose the theme of nature's scream as a symbol of despair and anguish, he was aware that the Norwegian and German audience would understand the importance in this. The text would only serve as a confirmation of what we already knew. 

According to Bjerke (1995) Munch took the role as a modern Christ in his paintings , as a victim, as a "healer". The separation from others was caused by himself simultaneously taking the role of a victim. He talked often about attention as the "wounds" and he had to live with these wounds suffering of anxiety and loneliness. Bjerke (1995) also says that there is another perspective to see all this from; to see is as the mental state we call narcissism. 

Munchs use of the frontal perspective has been interpreted as an expression of his personal qualities and his willingness to face the world "face to face" (Bjerke, 1995). Eggum (quoted in Bjerke, 1995) have drawn a parallel between the actors on stage and Munch's painting: the psychological space created between actor and audience in the theater is exactly what Munch created between viewer and painting. But his soul is seen as the central entity, and it is visible in the background. 

According to Heller (1995) Munchs landscape can be seen identical to the woman, or women, the visual forces of the nature comparable to the woman's sexual powers. There are psychological theories that provide support to this approach, see Steinberg(1986). Munch's way of shaping lines, especially in the lithographic version of The Cry, is taking a form of hair and hair is what Munch often used as a symbol of the strange, female power. According to this interpretation the figure (you are not able to know if it is a woman or a man) in The Cry is losing himself and going to be fused with nature (the woman) when taking up natural form rather than to remain human. Anxiety and despair is causing its identity being less real than nature, and the loss of identity leads to death, Heller (1995). According to Steinberg and Weiss (quoted in Kjellqvist, 1995) Munch feared landscape as he feared the woman and he felt threatened to be contained or infringement of it. 

George Wingfield Digby (cited in Bjerke, 1995) has made a psychological interpretation of the heavens form in the background. According to him, you can see God's eye, father's eye, an eye that represents the omniscient and omnipotent super-ego. He sees the figure in the painting as a woman blocking the road of the artist and calls it "The terrible mother" that blocks the way of the artist. The Cry would be an image of the anguish caused by the mother's death in a little boy. 

According Wittlich (1987) The Cry can be seen from formula point of view as a duel between curves and straight lines and the head of the figure is located at the point where these powers clash. This describes instability. Such a figure on the diagonal is an ordinary picture metaphor for the vulnerability of a contemporary man. 

Bjerke (1995) also means that it is unclear if Munch actually formulated his own symbolic experience or if he is speaking an universal language, understandable based on archetypical ideas and general experience. 

It appeared as Munch began to become more and more volatile after 1891 even if he had not been in balance before either. This can be read in Bjrn Stadt (1995).

He painted Despair a year after the actual event (natural phenomenon) had occurred. Iy was already just colored memories of the growing fear of insanity. Moreover, human memory is a complex system that can build on memories afterwards, add or forget details of events that far back in time, ie. memory is not reliable, see eg Farthing (1992). Therefore, you can not certainly know what Munch actually saw or experienced that night in 1891. Munch was not insane in the sense of the word, but suffered from severe anxiety attacks and was periodically paranoid (Bjorn Stadt, 1995). When came to a hospital in Copenhagen, October 1908, he told about ten years living hell. He thought he was surrounded by Norwegian enemies, he heard voices and he was generally in a bad condition. It's that inferno, paranoia and anxiety that we probably can see in The Cry. 
Munch was diagnosed as depressive, he spent eight months in the hospital, and then he made the theme of anxiety and began to paint more mundane events. 

"I painted picture after picture of the impressions I had had in my mind in the emotional moments - painted the lines and colors I had imprinted there at my inner eye - the cornea - I just painted what I recalled without adding anything - without the details I no longer kept in mind. - Thus arose the simplicity of the paintings - the apparent emptiness " 
(Eggum 1989, p. 52). 

That is Munch's own words about how he saw his paintings.

He talks about seeing with his "inner eye". Perhaps it is what The cry is about; the seeing with an inner eye.

The experience you get by looking at the board varies depending on the individual's own experiences and it is different for every person because you can not be sure that our sensory systems are similar each other's.

But probably there is something universal in the painting because most of us can automatically place it in the category of horror. The painting has fascinated, and still is, many analysts of art. 
Psychologists since Freud's time, have been trying to analyze various pieces of art and to find out how much the artist's personality is reflected in his / her works. Munch's paintings have been particularly widely analyzed as subjectivity of these is extremely clear. You can see his art as if the subjective contents had been translated into universal understandable symbols, ie. non-verbal representations which convey feelings that you can not express verbally (Heller, 1973). According to Heller (1973) you have interpret the pathological content of the painting, including a fear of losing one's own integrity and to be fused with the surroundings. The important thing is that Munch has managed to capture his almost psychotic sense in a way that makes both people of his time people of today instinctively understand what he meant. According to Heller (1973) Munch has, through introspection, managed to achieve an image of man's schizoid inside, as it looks after heavy abuse of alcohol and when you feel anxiety as nature's cry. 

Jung (quoted in Hobcke, 1989) argues that the bizarre symptoms in psychotic patients is not so different of the painting. This can be seen in normal or neurotic patients, even if they appear stronger among psychotic patients. The issue in both cases is that the symptoms are a symbolic expression of unconscious material. According to Jung (1967/1997) also archetypal of collective and hence universal symbols are recognized. This would explain why most people recognize the feeling in the painting. 

Munch is not the only and not the first to have described the sun as "bloody" and anxious. Previously it was thought generally that people most often committed suicide at sunset. 
A German writer, Georg Buchner (quoted in Heller, 1973, p. 91) has a short story describing an evening before a planned suicide as following, where the main character asks: "Dont you hear it? Do not you hear that terrible voice screaming across the entire horizon, which we normally call silence? ". Since he can no longer endure the screaming sound he jumps out the window. Even Munch had written his suicidal thoughts in his diaries. 
The same apocalyptic scene is described in the Nordic mythology. In Njls saga (Baeksted, 1996, p. 66), we canread the following: "Fear faithfully now is it time to look around, when bloody, dark clouds move in the sky, the blood of the fallen colors the air, contrary the sing of the nature. When reading these words you can draw a conclusion that Munch possibly knew this story, and thus knew how he would go about to describe the threatening atmosphere. 
Blood ghost in Munch's mind can possibly be explained by the fact that he, when he was five years old, was witness to his mother's death with accompanying lung bleeding. According to Kjellqvist, (1995) the psycho-analysts are putting a great emphasis on this event in terms of Munch's artistic and spiritual development. 

The figure's head in The Cry is in some kind of "borderline" and the interesting thing is that the definition of "borderline" in psychology is considered as a state between psychosis and neurosis associated with more or less severe anxiety attacks. Can Munch have placed the head lying between the stable (the artificial) and the dynamic (nature) and at the same time feeling like borderline. Munch's attitude to nature was that it was a projection of a psychological sense (see above) and no longer had any significance when it was separated from the emotional reactions caused in human mind, (Bjerke, 1995). Lange (1994) writes; " Munchs kunst er en sjelens impresjonisme, icke en sansens. Det store hos Munch er at han som regel klarer gi uttryckk for sin sjelsstemning da han malte billedet, uten ty til symbolistenes kunstige antydninger og kombinasjoner, deres vold mot naturen, og uten opofre de rent maleriske. Munch presser naturen i et jerngrepp av streng linje og ekspressiv forenklet farve, men han lemlester den sjelden (det hender dog. f. eks, i Skrik) og han gjor sig aldri avhengig av rent tankemessige symboler...]".

I.e. it was in The Cry Munch let the soul go into the nature. 

Generally, painting a psychological "destructive" approach with the strange figure in the middle, the hands covering over the ears to not hear the scream of nature, while the figure itself is screaming of anxiety. The landscape does not match your expectations and the tension created by the bronze straight edges against the sky is evident. The colors are unrealistic. The sky seems to burn or to be blood as Munch wanted it to be. My interpretation is that painting is an image of instability. The main figure is located exactly where the dynamic and stable merge and it is also a manifestation of what was in the artist's head, the great fear that he would be mentally ill, as his sister did. Also, the fact that he, after really having had the big collapse and being released of the fear and his anxiety stopped, even the his paintings changed color. The portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, painted 1905-06 is believed to be an idealized self. You can find similarities with The Cry in the background but the figure (Nietzsche) is standing straight and radiating power (Heller, 1973). 
Duel between curves and straight lines also describes a duel in the artist's psyche, a duel between to be stable or unstable. The stability of the image is artificial (the bridge) and lability natural (dynamic heaven). Therefore, one could say that Munch might experience stability in himself as an artificial phenomenon and creativity in himself is the naturally dynamic even if it periodically felt scary.

The man screaming in The Cry can describe a sense of belonging to nature but as Munch described the nature so frightening, it is difficult to know what the concept of nature really meant for him. Maybe he switched nature with femininity, the fact is that he had had problems his their relationships to women (Bjorn Stadt, 1995). Munch himself has said that he painted "an extract of nature" (Eggum, 1989) and it suggests that he thought he had managed to describe the nature's (the soul's) landscape. If he then saw God's omniscient eye in the sky, it is a further manifestation of instability and fear of punishment. Mother's death and race mental illness has certainly played a major role in this. 
The interpretation of the frontal perspective as a desire to meet the world face to face (Bjerke, 1995) can also be interpreted as braveness. The soul's landscape since is visible in the background confirms this. There also is a clear demarcation between the figure and "friends" (Wittlich, 1987). It is quite clear that Munch felt lonely and misunderstood and you can see that feeling in the form of the migratory people away in the background. Then you can speculate whether he somehow periodically enjoyed the solitude and the negative attention and therefore felt as a wounded (blood) of Christ replace or healer. 
I am inclined to see the painting as Bjerke (1995) does: a lasting state where there is no outside or inside without a whole. The whole of this picture describes a certain instabilityof the artist's mind.

Literature:

Ahlgren, L. & Magnusson, T. (red). (1993). Bonniers Lexikon 3.Lidman produktion AB.

Bischoff, U. (1990). Edvard Munch. Kln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag.

Bjerke, O. S. (1995). Edvard Munch Harald Sohlberg; Landskapes of the Mind. New York: National Academy of Design.

Bjrnstadt, K. (1995). Historien om Edvard Munch. Stockholm: Norstedts Frlag AB.

Baeksted, A. (1996). Nordiska gudar och hjltar. Oslo/Gjvik: Norbok a.s.

Dinnerstein, D. (1976). Sjjungfrun och Minotaurus: Lustens ordning och mnniskans olust. Lund: Natur och Kultur.

Eggum, A. (1989). Munch and Photography. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Farthing, G. W. (1992). The Psychology of Consciousness. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Hermeren, G. (1995). Vad vi kan lra oss av konsten? Framtider 1, 5-9.

Heller, R. (1973). Munch : The Scream. London: The Penguin Press.

Hobcke, R. H. (1989). Jungs psykologi: En resa genom C. G. Jungs samlade verk. Stockholm: Bokfrlaget Natur och Kultur.

Jung, C.G. (1967/1997). Jaget och det omedvetna. Stockholm: Wahlstrm & Widstrand.

Kjellqvist, E-B. (1995). Ur frbjudna kllor. Horisont, 42;2, 4-16.

Lubcke, P. (red). (1988). Filosofilexikonet. Stockholm: Bokfrlaget Forum.

Lange, M. (1994). Edvard Munch og Max Klinger: Forbudt omrde. Konsthistorisk Tidskrift. 63; 3-4, 233-249.

Wittlich, P. (1987). Edvard Munch. Prag: Odeon.