Screams and Paint

Edvard Munch: The Scream

All artists are crazy. That's what they say. But then, you know what THEY say. Of course there have been a few slightly mentally unstable artists, but then there have been a few mentally unstable politicians as well. Why generalise it just to artists. Perhaps because mentally disturbed artists create works that can have such a deep psychological impact on a person. We KNOW they're disturbed. We can experience it, through the sights and the sounds they present us with.

In 1908, Edvard Munch had a nervous breakdown, a culmination of his anxiety and fears going all the way back to his childhood. During the years previous to this he had experienced some of the most extreme emotions humans can. At age 5, his mother died and at 14, his favourite sister, Sophie. Tuberculosis entered his childhood bringing him horrid visions of the devil. Death, pain, paranoia, despair.

It was these emotions Munch eventually, in 1893, brought to the canvas of The Scream (then called Despair). With several preliminary studies and paintings already completed, he tried to create the all encompassing emotion of total complete undeniable despair. When all hope is gone; when death is eventual; when the world seems to be completely against you and you just can't deal with people any longer; and when there is nothing you can do about any of it.

The painting is fairly early in his ouevre. As first exhibited, it was the final painting in a six painting study for a series called Love. The study consisted of the paintings Summer Night's Dream [The Voice], Kiss [The Kiss], Love and Pain [The Vampire], The Face of the Madonna [The Madonna], Jealousy, and Despair [The Scream]. The study was meant to represent the course of love from the initial meeting, through the joy, the heartache, and the final despair. The Scream, though, was more than just the despair of love. It was the despair of life as he had experienced one day while walking with his friends. As he has written himself:

I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red.

I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired, and I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and the city.

My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

The painting was more than just a painting to him, it was an experience he would never forget. He wrote many accounts of that day in various languages as well as producing several versions of The Scream, including a lithograph.

How did Munch achieve such an enormously disturbing effect? Looking at the painting we see a deformed screaming figure in the foreground standing on a long straight bridge receding into the distance. Two tall erect men in the distance walk away from the figure. The background is a distorted view of a fjord. Long swirling, curved lines form the coast. The water is a murky yellow, while the land, a deep blue. The sky, with its streaks of red and orange speak of a sun that has just set.

It is indeed a curious piece. The sky is not really that of a sunset, but more of the blood red Munch described. The yellow, a horrid mustard, counteracts the red causing the sky to look more like it is burning than setting. The land becomes this watery blue where we expect brown. Yet it seems to blend into the picture by changing colour as it swirls around to the sea green hills. A colour we almost expect. A bulbous form in the right hand part of the background is painted an almost flesh colour with streaks of green and blue, the same colour as the boards of the bridge. This makes the figure in the foreground stay in the centre of the canvas while also bringing it forward. The water is an ugly yellow with the only feature making it recognisable as water being the ships sailing atop it. The figure is dressed in a greenish black garment, its flesh being a sickly tan. The bridge and men walking in the background appear in normal colours, in contrast to the rest of the picture.

Besides the peculiar colours used in the piece, the brushstrokes make for a curious effect. The curving landscape is contrasted with the long straight bridge and firm upright people in the background. Nature versus man. The figure in this way becomes a part of nature as it curves around toward an es shape. But nature in respect is becoming part of the figure as it takes on the mood, through its brushstrokes and colour, of the screaming figure.

Overall, the painting makes for a psychologically disturbing sight. We recognise the position the figure is in. The hands over the ears screaming. It is a position we often see people in asylums in. We feel disturbed through the distorted landscape and tension when we cross over to the straightness of the bridge. The painting in its composition, colour, and brush marks creates the emotion Munch hoped to achieve, complete despair.

We enjoy the painting because of this, because at times we feel the exact same way and we like to know other people do. Perhaps it was only when you were a child lost in the city that the city turned monstrous and all hope was lost of ever finding your mother. Or perhaps later on. We have all felt the emotion to some degree in our life, and so, though we are disturbed by the painting, we are likewise drawn to it.

Munch was drawn to it. Several copies of the painting we done after the original in 1893. He painted them because he was remembering a time when it had happened to him. Just as when we view it, we understand the emotion only because it has happened to us as well. Munch might have been mentally unstable, but he wasn't crazy. He was as sane as the rest of us.

Francis Bacon: A Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

Next time you walk through a gallery, look around. Undoubtedly you'll see one or two painters with an easel set up, painting one of the paintings on the wall. It happens all the time, painters paint paintings of other painter's paintings. It's a useful form of studying an artist's work as well as a high praise of it. What a better way is there to examine a painting than to paint it yourself and reexperience what the artist had to go through to create the painting. And what better praise than to spend days, maybe weeks, recreating a piece as an artist did.

Francis Bacon knew this, and it was exactly this that he did in 1953 in his Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. But what Bacon did was not to copy stroke for stroke Velazquez's work, but rather to bring new meaning to the work by modifying it. And modify it he did.

Bacon's Study is a 60 1/4 inch by 46 1/2 inch oil on canvas painting done after Diego Velazquez's portrait Pope Innocent X. It consists of a screaming pope set in a royal throne with vertical streaks distorting the body.(3) The bottom half of the pope seems to fade into ether as a bright light shines from the bottom part of the back of the chair. The chair extends outward off the canvas in more distortion.

In comparing this to the original painting, we note many differences. The slip of paper the pope was holding is now gone as he desperately grips the chair. His beard and mustache are missing was well as the ring on his right finger. Other things have been changed as a distortion effect. The screaming pope, the streaks across the painting, the fading of the pope's gown, the extension of the chair, the clenching of the fists. All these serve to heighten a sense of extreme pain about the painting. The ever watchful pope becomes the eternally tortured pope.

This theme of turning a normal figure into a distorted one is one that followed in Bacon's work as well as other artists at the time. Trying to capture the horrors of the war onto canvas and express the emotion seeing such horrors brought was the aim of many artists shortly after 1945. Though this trend quickly died out, Bacon made it a life time theme in his work, a theme rooted in his upbringing.

From his early childhood, Bacon had a sense of constant threat. Born to an English family in Dublin, Ireland in 1909, his childhood consisted of living in a house camouflaged and barricaded, with the warning that at any time someone could break into the house or worse. His education was sparse and at age sixteen, he ran away from Dean Close School in Cheltenham. By age eighteen he had already visited London, Berlin, and Paris and had set up designing furniture in England.

The disturbance of his childhood on his mind took form in the 1930's in which he began to paint distorted figures; however destroying most of the paintings he created. With the second world war, he witnessed pain and destruction to no end. The sense of having to shelter in the Underground at any moment brought back childhood memories and feelings of entrapment and pain. It was these feelings he tried to bring out in the pope paintings.

Preceding the Study were several paintings more deserving the title of study. Several of the Head series developed aspects that would eventually enter into Study. Head VI in particular shows a bust of a screaming pope with streaks going through the painting. As well, several portraits using Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X were completed before Study was done.

Although this was not the first pope piece, it became the pinnacle of his pope paintings, with his interest lost soon after creating this one. Having been early in his oeuvre, it is an incredible piece that took Velazquez's powerful portrait of Innocent X and turned it into something equally powerful, but even more so disturbing. His Study was not an attempt to mock or belittle Velazquez, but rather to praise the work. Bacon was a great admirer of Velazquez and this was just one of several paintings he did to honour the long dead painter.

Bacon, in so honouring Velazquez, however, created a masterpiece in its own right. One that is powerful, emotional, and extremely disturbing. It is one that could almost compare to Munch's The Scream.

The Paintings: A Comparison

The scream. A moment of anxiety, despair, and isolation. Or an expression of total inexorable pain. The two are separate, but equally valid statements of that loud, ugly action humans perform in extreme emotional states. Likewise, both are forms Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon chose to paint.

In Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) we see a deformed figure screaming from the despair of life. Conversely Bacon's Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) presents us with a look of pain on a screaming pope. These two paintings, painted sixty years apart, are of interest viewed together. They serve in a way to mark the beginning and the end of Expressionism.

The mere fact that both artists chose the scream to express an emotion is interesting. A scream distorts the face in weird ways, almost without any coaxing, deforming it to some monstrous mask. Yet each artist represents his scream in a different way. Munch distorts the shape of the head to almost a pear shape, paints no nose, but two nostrils, and represents the screaming mouth as an upright oval, an altogether simple composition. Bacon, however, creates his scream with much greater detail. Having studied the mouth in a book about oral disease as a child, he puts his knowledge to use, created a detailed mouth with lips and teeth. As well he uses a proportionate head.

Both artists recognised in creating their scream, the effectiveness of a round washed out eye (as opposed to a normal tapered oval eye) in creating tension. Similarly, both used a specific brush technique to add emotion, though their techniques differ. Munch uses wavy curved brush strokes to create a fluid, moving, emotional background opposing it with harsh, straight, rational lines leading off to form the bridge. Bacon uses a wipe technique to smear the brown base and black background over onto the page having the background invade the foreground, while also forming a column of light around the pope.

Munch and Bacon alike took their screaming figure and made it into something super natural. Munch bends the body toward an es shape, matching the curves of the shoreline behind the figure. The figure, by bending into a form no human could, mimics nature yet extends beyond nature as well. Bacon's pope conversely becomes a ghost as he fades away beneath his torso.

To differ the emotions given by the scream, each artist has put the screamer in a different pose. Bacon uses the clenching fists to present a painful scream. Munch takes the pose of the hands covering the ears, a pose we most often see people screaming in because of mental strife.

Skin colour of each screamer is unusual, causing a sickly monstrous look. Munch matches the ugly yellow water of the fjord with the screamers hands and face. Likewise, the purple cape of Pope Innocent X is reflected in the washed out violet of the pope's face.

Finally each painter leaves his canvas in a semi-finished state. The creation of the piece is left in the piece. Bacon's paint drippings can still be seen in places. Munch's slips with the brush, missed and smudged spots still remain. No attempt had been made by either artist to clean up the piece to a more perfect state.

Overall both artists have created a disturbing painting using some form of the screaming figure. Both Munch's deformed figure and Bacon's screaming pope serve to express deep painful emotions, Munch's of despair, Bacon's of pain. Created fifty years apart, they have commonalitites that tie them closely together and differences that throw them desperately apart. Both however remain fantastically painted paintings that both disturb and intrigue.

muse@musespace.com