Excerpt from Ann Temkin's "The Scream: Edvard Munch"

"The Scream now on view at The Museum of Modern Art is a unique work of art. It exists in contradiction to the seemingly infinite number of images, produced during the course of more than a century, that replicate, modify, and caricature it. Edvard Munch drew this image with pastels on a sheet of paper mounted on cardboard. It measures 32 by 23 1/4 inches. He made it in 1895, signing and dating it on the lower left. The artist housed the drawing in a gilded frame bearing a plaque with a text hand-lettered in red paint, signed "E. M." which read:

"I was walking along the road with two of my friends. The sun set - the sky became a bloody red. And I felt a touch of melancholy - I stood still, dead tired - over the blue-black fjord and city hung blood and tongues of fire. My friends walked on - I stayed behind - trembling with fright - I felt the great scream in nature."

. . . Munch's prolonged engagement with the motif of The Scream surely underlies his extraordinary expression of it, creating images in which he transcended the conventional visual language of the era. His desire to ground The Scream in a first-person text placed the emphasis on a private experience; yet he depersonalized the portrayal to such a degree that he opened up the situation to everyman. The urgency of the image was immediately perceived. Munch's reiterations were the product of not only his own fascination with the motif but also that of his contemporary audience.

We will never know what prompted Munch to invent that singular figure, and why he never repeated or adapted it in compositions other than The Scream. We do know, however, that The Scream, in all the variants Munch created, remains distinct from the cliché it has become. This is because a work of art is much more than an image that is reproducible manually, digitally, and endlessly. It is instead a thing whose effect depends on specifics of size, texture, color, and any number of intangible qualities stemming from its moment of origin. Such a work catalyzes a unique experience every time an attentive viewer stands before it."

Temkin, A. (2012) The Scream: Edvard Munch. New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art