What have we done with The Scream?

The hammer fell at $120 million, the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction last week. The painting was Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, one of the most iconic and best known images ever created.

 

Yet the artist’s studio and the auctioneer’s showroom could hardly be further apart.

Munch painted this version of The Scream in 1895. Having rejected the narrow pietism of his family, he joined a Bohemian community in Oslo and came under the influence of the nihilist Hans Jaeger, who sought to drive his generation either to moral corruption or to suicide. Munch chose the former, and through his art yearned to ‘paint his own soul’, translating raw emotion and his search for meaning on to the canvas.

He later described the personal anguish behind the painting: "For several years I was almost mad… You know my picture, 'The Scream?' I was stretched to the limit – nature was screaming in my blood…"

The painting has since captured the imagination of each generation in the twentieth century, as it expresses at gut level the pervasive sense of angst and alienation – from ourselves, from others, from nature, from God.

Contrast this with the scene last week at Sotheby’s, when art collectors and their agents gathered in elegant attire to fight over who would part with the most outrageous sum to acquire this cry of a lost young man on a Norwegian bridge.

Munch’s iconic painting no longer provokes serious discussion about what has gone so tragically wrong with the Western view of the world; instead the image has become domesticated, commercialised and trivialised.

In place of stimulating an enquiry into how nihilism and its 21st century forms lead people to despair and suicide, The Scream excited investors into calculating the painting’s financial value and how that might increase.

Rather than prompting a sympathetic hearing of young people’s troubled search for meaning in a painful and confusing world, the record-breaking painting has become the trophy of someone who might instead have spent that $120 million on initiatives to rekindle a sense belonging, understanding and hope to those young people inheriting only broken families, lifeless philosophies, bankrupt economies and a fearful world.

What have we done with The Scream?