The Scream, take one

Post by Grubb. 

Ella wasn’t as excited to see the Munch Museum as I was, but she knew if I spent another day in Norway without cruising this large, exhaustive collection of his artwork, I might end up on one the many Oslo bridges howling with anguish.  The architecture of the museum thrusts itself above the water with modernist panache.  Inside, escalators take visitors up to the fourth and sixth floors where the Munch collection is divided.  The sixth floor is biographical; Edward Munch lived a long life so there is plenty of personal material on display.  Also on the sixth floor are some of his larger, lighter paintings that were done after his recovery from a mental breakdown in 1908.

On the fourth floor any Munch painting I’ve ever wanted to see has place on a wall.  This one below I particularly loved for being in being a more inward take on “The Scream”.

Then there was this phenomenal nude.  Everything about her is rundown.  She’s let everything go, the blues and the blacks emphasizing a sagging sense of loss.  And all this against the violent twists of red in rumpled fabric bunched up over the chair.

Then, twenty feet away, another nude, a “Madonna”.  Nothing blue in her flesh tones.  Her face is tilted up with sense of pride.  The halo is red.

So I wasn’t going to the Munch Museum and miss out on seeing “The Scream”.  It’s been etched into my consciousness like anyone born in the twentieth century, but still, to be in its presence, to take it in, feel the feeling, it’s a rite of Norwegian passage.  You’d think that catching sight of “The Scream” in Edvard’s museum wouldn’t be too difficult.  Wrong!  Entering the dark chapel dedicated to exhibiting “The Scream” I saw that there was a group of people clustered around a small drawing.  It was a version of “The Scream”.  Two other versions, a print and a painting, were behind closed steel panels.  Every hour these panels would close over “The Scream” on display and open on another version on one the walls in the room. 

 It was like being on The Wheel of Fortune trying to guess which “The Scream” you’d get to see.  Would it be the painting or the print?  The museum’s justification for this guessing game is that Edvard painted all his versions of “The Scream” on cardboard or paper making them more sensitive to light than oil paintings on canvas.  So, okay, Munch didn’t realize it was going to one the most famous paintings ever popularized.  Or maybe he did and predicted he wouldn’t need oil on canvas permanence when photographic reproductions would spread the image worldwide.

I asked one of the museum guards when the next version of “The Scream” would be revealed.  She said in a half-hour.  I told Ella I wanted to wait and see what the museum’s Wheel of Fortune would disclose.  Ella said she would wait for me outside.