Most people assume that the figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream is screaming. It’s not. It’s reacting to an event: “I felt a great scream pass through nature,” Munch wrote. He created several versions of The Scream; it’s the 1895 lithograph which is in the excellent exhibition of prints at the British Museum in London, Edvard Munch: love and angst.
The lithograph is small, just 14 by 10 inches, but its stark black lines are compelling; they reach into you with a barbed shiver, conveying the pain, the agony of hearing, experiencing the scream. The figure could be male or female – it’s any of us, all of us.
