Poster for Wes Craven’s film Scream, 1996
with no apparent limitations . (An amusing instance of this transformation: the mutant turtle Leonardo with its hands/flippers pressed to both sides of its face .)
Today, wide-open eyes, a gaping mouth and hands clasping cheeks is considered to represent an appropriate response to almost every fear-provoking situation . The Scream’s presence is now so powerful that it is tempting to interpret practically every scream (Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’? The Spice Girls’ ‘Holler’? Even Timbaland’s mischievous ‘Scream’?) as a shrill expression of the angst-filled human condition . In an art-historical context, though, it has been common to view The Scream in relation to the rest of the work that Munch left behind, and to treat one or more of the paintings or drawings, prints or texts as the starting point for discussions of the period (The Scream as expressionist breakthrough), style (those characteristic wavy lines), the work’s creation (Munch’s biography and the previously cited literary impression) or its artistic statement (a universal expression of humanity’s existential angst) . But what this approach fails to bring out is that its influence doesn’t only go in one direction – that is to say, not just from Munch’s brush/pen/plate outwards into the world . The influence also flows the opposite way, from the broader culture back into the museum .
The Scream’s mutations are, in other words, not purely echoes . Just as our reading of them is affected by Munch’s originals, the mutations are spooking (or screaming) away in the background whenever we look at his pictures on the wall of a museum today, and they unavoidably work their way into our experience of the originals . This book takes this two-way influence seriously, by taking its starting point not in Munch’s concrete works, but in the entire network of Screams and Scream mutations which define what his most famous image is in our culture today . The essays in this book explore three different dimensions of this constantly expanding network, in which The Scream circulates as a motif that is always recognisable but altered every time: art, popular culture and material culture . These three areas in no way represent separate channels, but are partly coinciding dimensions of an enormous tapestry of shifting relationships between originals and copies, art and kitsch, analogue and digital creations as well as two- and three-dimensional renderings .
In ‘Art Ventriloquism’, Patricia G . Berman writes that the reincarnation of Munch’s most famous image in a growing number of more recent artistic projects serves not only to keep channelling it, but also to shape the personal and collective experiences these projects express . In this way the image is still an active element in artistic discourse 100 years after it was created . In his essay ‘Virality and Migration: The Scream in Popular Culture’, Øyvind Vågnes describes how the same image migrates through popular
Edvard Munch
Sick Mood at Sunset. Despair, 1892
Georg Baselitz
Der Brückechor (The Brücke Choir), 1983
Oil on canvas
Jannis Kounellis
Homage to Munch II, 2003
Screenprint on brown craft paper
the telescoping roadway and activated sky in one of Erich Heckel’s earliest woodcuts, Over the Hill (1903) . 7 Munch’s motif also seems to have been a source for Heckel’s Man on a Plain (1917), rendered during the Great War . Much like Munch’s open-mouthed creature, the expressive figure in Heckel’s woodcut holds its head between the hands . But rather than Przybyszewski’s image of explosive sexuality, Heckel’s version of the motif (not unlike today’s malleable emoji) offers the sense of overwhelming personal and even political paralysis in light of uncertain societal conditions . In Vienna, the artists of Heckel’s generation likewise created works that echo the liberties that Munch took with human anatomy and the sense of explosive emotion conveyed by The Scream . For that generation, asserting the primacy of sensation over optical empiricism, Munch’s work reverberated as a visual sign of subjectivity .
The National Socialists branded such creative license with amplified form and colour as ‘degenerate’ in the 1930s . For postwar Northern European artists, the embrace of spontaneous production, as introduced by Munch and his admirers, enacted a recuperation of that earlier generation . Oslo had been the beneficiary of Munch’s entire collection upon the artist’s death in 1944 . After the war ended in 1945, a major retrospective of Munch’s paintings and prints (over 340 of them) opened at Norway’s National Gallery and circulated in Scandinavia, signalling the liberation from the Nazi occupation . A Danish critic commented that Munch’s early motifs such as The Scream were still vital ‘like a fingernail in a bloody sore …’ . 8 In this way, The Scream was translated as a token of agitation and freedom .
After 1945, as travel resumed after the war and Munch’s works began to circulate in exhibitions, artists such as Asger Jorn could again experience the work directly . Jorn viewed Munch as a link in a chain of Nordic – as opposed to German – Expressionists . This was a legacy that Jorn, one of the founders of the Cobra Group, embodied . 9 Paintings such as The Eagle’s Share II (1951) pay homage to Munch through the stretched image of a skull that inhabits fantastic creatures and swirling paint layers .
In the 1980s, Georg Baselitz mined the legacy of Expressionism in the slipstream of traumatic memory from the war . Baselitz stated that ‘pictures are possible only through models of other pictures’, images to claim and digest . 10 Munch has long been an important presence in his thought and work, the subject of several paintings from 1983 (Edvard’s Ghost and Edvard’s Head) . Baselitz’s Supper in Dresden is one of the canonical works of the so-called Neo-Expressionist generation (1983) . In it, Munch appears among avatars of the Brücke artists – Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and Heckel – in an inverted and enormous pastiche of Nolde’s Last Supper (1909) . The 1983 Brücke Choir likewise inserts an openmouthed avatar of Munch into the midst of the Dresden artists’
