Color in Painting
Edvard Munch
The Scream
1893
Tempera and crayon on cardboard, 91 × 73.5 cm. Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
Bands of red, orange and yellow fill the sky above the fjord, and the same curving strokes run through land, water and figure. The museum calls the colors non-realistic and ties them to the subject, anxiety.
- In notebook lines written before the painting, Munch recalled a sunset sky turning blood red, with flames over the blue-black fjord.
- A year earlier he used the same colors, format and landscape in Sick Mood at Sunset; chiefly the central figure changed.
- In the later painted version at the Munch Museum, cadmium yellow strokes in the sky have faded to off-white, mainly from damp, not light.
Munch also made a black-and-white lithograph of the motif in 1895; some impressions were colored by hand in watercolor.
Concepts
Image: Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo · Work: public domain (no known copyright restrictions). Photo: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)