look closer

The hands are over the ears. Munch is painting a listener, and the scream belongs to the landscape.

Munch wrote down the evening it came from, and the note is the best label the painting has ever had. He was walking a road with two friends at sunset; the sun went down; the sky turned blood red; he stopped, leaned on the fence, tired to death, while his friends walked on, and he sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. Which corrects the century of misreading in one line. The figure on the bridge is not the source. It has its hands over its ears. The road is real and identifiable, above Ekeberg on the eastern edge of what was then Kristiania, with the fjord and the city below. Two details of the neighborhood have kept biographers busy: down the hill stood the city slaughterhouse, and near it the asylum where Munch's sister Laura was a patient. He had lost his mother and his favorite sister to tuberculosis by the time he was fourteen, and later put it plainly, that illness, madness and death were the angels that attended his cradle. Meteorologists have offered a gentler explanation for the sky, the volcanic sunsets that followed the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, which turned European evenings red for months. Both can be true. Munch painted the weather he was standing in. He made the image four times, twice in paint, once in pastel, once as a lithograph that let it travel the world. The 1893 painting in Oslo carries an extra mark, a sentence pencilled in the upper left in tiny letters: can only have been painted by a madman. For a century nobody knew whether an offended visitor had written it. Handwriting analysis by the National Museum in 2021 concluded the hand was Munch's own, added after the picture was mocked in public, which is either a joke, an admission, or a man agreeing with his critics on his own terms. Both versions have been stolen and both have come back, one out of a Norwegian gallery in 1994 during the Lillehammer Olympics, one off a museum wall at gunpoint in 2004. The face has become the most reproduced expression on earth, printed on cushions and inflatable dolls and, eventually, an emoji, which is a strange fate for a picture about a sound nobody else in it can hear.