The Scream is famous because Edvard Munch gave anxiety a face anyone can read at a glance: a stripped-down figure clutching its face under a blood-red sky. A century of posters, mugs and masks did the rest, until the painting became the picture people reach for when the world is too much.
Munch made the first version in 1893, after a sunset walk that he described in a notebook entry dated 22 January 1892: a sky turned red, and a scream passing through nature.
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That is how the picture is read now. It is not how it was read when it was new. In 1896, when it was shown in Paris, one critic proposed a different title for it, and the Munch Museum records the remark. It was not praise.
Munch did not wait for the critics to change their minds. The year before that Paris show he had begun sending the image into print, and he kept at it for years. The painting still did not become beloved.
Then Munch died, in 1944, and the Munch Museum says the popularity of the image "really took off" only after that. The face had circulated for almost fifty years. Something else had to happen to it.
What did a Paris critic want to call it?
"Wandering Fetus." That was the title one critic suggested in 1896, when the picture was shown in Paris, according to the Munch Museum. The remark is easier to understand once the picture is described plainly.
On the cardboard, a simplified figure stands at a railing and grips its own face with both hands, and screams, the National Museum in Oslo says. Two people walk on in the background. Ships sit on a dark blue-green fjord, and the sky is red and orange. The museum adds that the blood-red lines in the painting have been compared with sound waves.
I think that blankness is the whole trick. A face with almost no features belongs to no one in particular, so it can belong to anyone. For one critic in 1896 that emptiness was a joke. For the next century it was the point. Munch did not leave that face on a single sheet of cardboard.
What You'll Discover
Where its face first reached newsprint.
What changed after Munch died.
What Warhol did with it in 1984.
Why a stolen painting filled the news.