The Scream

About this work

Munch wrote in his diary about a walk at sunset outside Oslo: the sky turned blood red, he stopped, and felt "an infinite scream passing through nature". The figure in the painting is not screaming — it is shutting out a scream coming from outside. Munch returned to the motif four times.

The whole painting is built of wave lines flowing without a break — sky, water, bridge. Mosaic cannot flow; it can only set one unit beside another. Every wave here is a row of stones cut to a curve.