The Scream of Nature: The Imaginative and Iconic Works of Edvard Munch

Insightful online lecture from Stella Grace Lyons on the life and work of Edvard Munch.

Stella began by posing the question of whether Munch’s portrayal as a troubled artist was a correct one and then went on to prove it definitely was. She started by using some of his 70 plus self-portraits to look at his life from the death of his mother and sister when he was young, thought various love affairs to the reclusive end of his life.

She then went on to look at his pictures of other people which are studies of form and emotion with heart warming titles like “Despair”, “Ashes” and “Love and Pain” and broadened into talking about him as a symbolist. 

She ended by looking at the evolution of his most famous work “The Scream” from 1892 which we tend to think of as a work created in an artistic frenzy but it evolved from earlier drawings and from works like the attached. She discussed whether the figure was meant to me him, his sister who was committed or a universal image of crisis. Either  way it is about a sensation not a reality.

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