Dear Reader,

Recently, Greenpeace India and citizens’ groups launched a campaign, #Scream, to protest against stalled infrastructure projects in Bengaluru that have not only made the traffic situation worse but have also defaced the city. Murals and billboards inspired by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s iconic painting, The Scream (1893), appeared in places like Rajarajeshwari Nagar, Dommasandra flyover, and Malleswaram on April 1, graphically representing the citizens’ frustration. April Fool’s Day was chosen as the day of protest to highlight the way citizens are being fooled every day by promises made and broken by urban planners. 

At the Dommasandra flyover, which has been six years in the making, with Rs.321 crore spent on it, the skeletal figure of Scream staring in dismay out of a billboard was every Bangalorean shocked at the colossal waste of funds. In Kadugodi, citizens “screamed” against the illegal encroachment in the reserved forest. At Rajarajeshwari Nagar, a poster on one of the pillars of the unfinished flyovers asked, “A city for people or pillars?” In a drawing below it, a concrete monster with pointy teeth snarled menacingly, with Munch’s wispy figure, desperately seeking help, caught in its maw. According to reports, about Rs.71.45 crore has been spent or estimated for the 2022 project that is yet to see significant progress.

Why does this 19th century painting still speak so strongly to us, across time and geography? There is an ongoing memefest around it. In one from 2020, the dreaded pandemic year, the figure claps its palms to its cheeks in wonderment as two rolls of toilet paper appear before it. In another, the figure has changed its stance: it smiles ghoulishly, making a thumbs up. The text says, “Because screaming is too mainstream”. In yet another, the meta-est, the figure screams out, “Oh no! I’ve become a meme!”

Munch’s own note on the painting is well-known. He wrote in his diary in an entry headed, “Nice 22 January 1892”, “One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.”

The anguish on the face of the figure came to represent the emotions of the modernist generation, which would not only experience fear at an unprecedented scale at the carnage of the two World Wars, but would also, more disconcertingly, experience the fracturing of the self, the erasure of lines between the I and the Other, under the pressure of that fear. A second Renaissance was on its way, but in this case, man woke up not to find himself gloriously free, unshackled from old beliefs, but lying parched in a dry wasteland, where all beliefs have run aground.

Munch’s 1894 painting, Anxiety, has an angry red, swirly sky very similar to The Scream’s. The cadaverous figure reappears, this time in a black hat and suit, as if dressed for a funeral. He might be attending his own funeral, given how ghostly he looks. In a Berlin exhibition in 1902, Munch had hung the two paintings together on a wall representing “Fear of Life”. This is a recurring theme—even in his self-portrait, he looks startled, as if he has seen a ghost in the mirror.

Edvard Munch, born in 1863, was the second son of five children. When he was five, his mother died of tuberculosis, and his beloved sister Sophie followed soon after. Edvard’s father was unhinged by his wife’s early death: he would pace the room, muttering prayers. These mishaps scarred Edvard, who was a sickly child to begin with. Images of disease and deathbed would haunt his paintings. He wrote of his childhood: “Illness, madness and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.”

Another theme was female sexuality. His paintings on this subject might suggest he feared it: women are depicted either as innocent and sad or as lustful and boisterous. There is another category—the crone with death-kissed eyes.

Munch shied away from close relationships with women: his physical frailty and mental troubles probably induced in him a feeling of inadequacy. In a line of disastrous relationships, the most calamitous was the one with Tulla Larsen, who can be seen in many of his paintings. It ended in high drama, with Larsen threatening to shoot herself. Munch lost the top half of one of his fingers when the gun went off as he was trying to wrest it from her hands.

The affair induced lasting feelings of persecution, leading to a mental breakdown in 1908. A serio-comic sketch by the artist shows him receiving electric shock treatment. (Although the “talking cure” promoted by Freud was gaining prominence in certain quarters, it was mostly derided. “Shock therapy” was still widely used to treat mental illnesses.) A lifelong insomniac, Munch would often book an overnight couchette to Oslo as he found it easier to fall asleep on trains.

But he was conscious of how his creativity and neuroses were connected. “I would not cast off my illness for there is much in my art that I owe to it,” he confessed. Obviously, this was unsustainable. After the breakdown of 1908, he left Berlin for Norway, where he lived in rural seclusion, sketching scenes of nature and studies of workers.

It has been said that The Scream started off the Expressionist movement in the way it prioritised emotional experience over reality. The central figure’s emotions are projected on to the sky, which seems to writhe with anger (hinted by the red), melancholy (blue), and everything in between. The figure itself seems to be on the verge of being blown away by the torrent of emotions it feels.

There are two other figures standing behind it on the bridge, but they are peculiarly still. They might just be watching the spectacle, indifferent to the plight of the figure. The loneliness of the figure is emphasised—he is angsty because he is alone, and alone because is angsty, unlike the composed watchers. In short, here is the modern man—solitary, anxious, manic, hopeless. Munch has laid bare the soul of man under capitalism.

Workers in fields and factories were always a favourite subject for Munch. Of course, it was fashionable to paint them at that time, both by way of paying tribute to a vanishing tradition (in case of agricultural labourers) and as a way of voicing a critique of the mechanical life that the Industrial Revolution had birthed. But Munch also identified with the working class, probably finding relief from his emotional troubles in the steady rhythms of work.

One has to juxtapose The Scream with a painting like Workers Returning Home (1915) to figure out the depth of feelings that fuels Munch’s depiction of the toiling masses. In Workers Returning Home, men march in a line at the end of a shift. The legs of one is transparent, as if he is in the process of vanishing. The blue of the workers’ suits is the predominant colour—it is as if the streaks of blue from The Scream have broadened and taken over this canvas. But the most remarkable feature here are the workers’ eyes, or their lack. The three men walking towards the viewer have black holes where their eyes should have been.

T.S. Eliot would write later:

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars.

(“The Hollow Men”, 1925)

Yet, the overall impression of the painting is positive. These men might be in the valley of dying stars but they are not hollow. Rather, they are dignified by their labour—they are the citizens of tomorrow.

While all of us might not be aware of The Scream’s specific context, it is fitting that the painting is still used to voice protest. Munch is one of the early artists to have felt the emptiness of modern living in his bones. He vented, and so do we, whenever we want the hegemons to sit up and take notice.

See you next week.

Till then,

Anusua Mukherjee

Deputy Editor, Frontline