Edvard Munch's two most famous paintings, The Scream and his erotically-charged Madonna, were nabbed from a Norwegian art gallery at gunpoint a year ago.
The Scream is my favorite painting and not only Edvard Munch’s most famous work, it is also his most stolen.
The Scream was painted in 1893, at a time of profound changes in European societies. Those upheavals were very much reflected in the artistic production of the time period, which had been freed by the Impressionists twenty years earlier and was becoming more and more complex. Edvard Munch's work lies somewhere between Symbolism and Expressionism, much like other painters of his generation such as Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
The scream is as much a cry of help as a cry of anguish. The angst radiates out from the ghoulish face of the screamer, The world of The Scream is a dying world; the fear is that at any moment this world will simply disappear.
Munch wrote, concerning the image:
I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black
Sometimes I only feel this angst. I like this painting. I feel the empty..I feel the minute of decay..I'm on my way down...