> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What Does The Scream Actually Mean? - URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/what-does-the-scream-mean/ - Published: 2026-08-22T09:57:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-31T21:57:48.000Z - Description: Munch wrote down exactly what he saw, and it explains everything — including why the figure in the painting is not the one screaming. - Author: Fine Art America - Tags: Meaning & Story, Art History **The Scream shows an experience Munch recorded in his diary: walking at sunset outside Kristiania, he saw the sky turn blood-red and felt what he called an infinite scream passing through nature. The figure is not screaming. It is clamping its hands over its ears to shut out a scream coming from the world.** ## Munch wrote down exactly what happened Most famous paintings have to be interpreted. This one comes with the artist's own account. In a diary entry headed Nice, January 22, 1892, Munch described a walk outside Kristiania — the city now called Oslo: > I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. Every element of the painting is in that paragraph: the path and its railing, the two friends walking on, the fjord, the city, the burning sky. The setting is generally identified as the road along Ekeberg, the ridge east of the city looking back across the Oslofjord. The titles agree. In Norwegian the work is *Skrik* — a shriek, with no possessive attached. In Berlin, Munch exhibited it as *Der Schrei der Natur*: **The Scream of Nature**. ## The most common misreading: the figure is listening, not shouting [![Despair (1892) — Munch's first attempt at the same moment, with the figure still leaning on the railing](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-despair-edvard-munch.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-despair-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) Despair (1892) — Munch's first attempt at the same moment, with the figure still leaning on the railing Ask most people what the painting shows and they will say a person screaming. Look at the hands. They are pressed flat over the ears — the posture of someone blocking a sound out, not projecting one. The open mouth is horror, not volume. Munch painted the scene twice. The first attempt, *Despair* (1892), puts a hatted man on the same walkway under the same red sky, slumped over the railing, looking down. He does not scream either. In the second version Munch stripped the figure of its clothing, its hat and finally its face, leaving a hairless, sexless, skull-like form — a receiver for the sound rather than a portrait of a man. That changes what the painting is *about*. It is not someone having a breakdown, which is the reading merchandise relies on. It is a world that has become unbearable to someone standing still in it. ## Why the sky is red — three explanations, none of them settled The blood-red sky is the one detail Munch insisted was real, and researchers have argued about it for decades. **Krakatoa.** In 2004 the astronomer Donald Olson and colleagues proposed that Munch had seen the afterglow of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which threw enough ash into the atmosphere to produce lurid twilights over Europe. The window is narrow — those skies were visible in northern Europe only from late 1883 to about 1886. **Nacreous clouds.** In 2017 Norwegian meteorologists led by Svein Fikke argued for mother-of-pearl clouds: rare, iridescent, wave-patterned clouds that form in the polar stratosphere and are seen over Oslo in winter. Munch describes a single startling event, whereas Krakatoa sunsets recurred nightly for months — and the rippling bands in the sky are something volcanic haze does not produce. **Neither.** A third position is that hunting for a meteorological source misses the point: the sky is red because the feeling was red. Since nobody can date the walk, no theory can be confirmed. ## There are four Screams, and one of them has a confession on it Munch never treated the image as one finished object. He made four versions, plus an 1895 lithograph that let the composition circulate as a print — a large part of why it spread so fast. | Year | Medium | Where it is now | | ---- | -------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | | 1893 | Tempera and crayon on cardboard | National Museum, Oslo | | 1893 | Crayon on cardboard (unfinished) | Munch Museum, Oslo | | 1895 | Pastel on board | Private collection | | 1895 | Lithograph, many impressions | Museums and private collections worldwide | | 1910 | Tempera on cardboard | Munch Museum, Oslo | The 1895 pastel is the only version in private hands. It sold at Sotheby's in New York in May 2012 for $119.9 million, then the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. Across the red sky of the 1893 painting in Oslo, in tiny pencil letters, is a sentence: *Can only have been painted by a madman.* Noticed since 1904, it was long assumed to be vandalism. In February 2021 the National Museum of Norway published infrared scans and a handwriting comparison and concluded that Munch wrote it himself — probably after critics savaged the picture in 1895. ## How one man's panic became everybody's *The Scream* was never a standalone shocker. It belongs to *The Frieze of Life*, a cycle Munch re-hung for decades around love, anxiety and death, sitting in the anxiety group beside *Despair* and *Anxiety*. He came to it having lost his mother and his sister Sophie to tuberculosis in childhood. Its later life reads like a thriller. The Oslo painting was stolen from the National Gallery in February 1994, on the morning the Lillehammer Olympics opened, and recovered three months later. The 1910 version was taken from the Munch Museum in an armed daylight raid in 2004, with *Madonna*, and recovered in 2006. What made it universal is what Munch stripped out: no costume, no nationality, no gender, barely a face. Anyone can be that figure, which is why it works as a poster, a parody, a mask and an emoji. The irony is that endless reproduction has flattened it back into the one reading Munch's own text rules out — a cartoon of someone yelling, rather than the far stranger picture of someone being screamed at by the sky. ## Frequently asked questions ### What does The Scream actually mean? It depicts a moment Munch recorded in his diary in January 1892: walking at sunset near Kristiania, he saw the sky turn blood-red and felt what he called an infinite scream passing through nature. The painting is about that sensation arriving from outside the figure — which is why Munch's German title was The Scream of Nature. ### Is the figure in The Scream actually screaming? No. The hands are pressed over the ears, the posture of someone shutting a sound out rather than making one. Munch's own account describes standing still, trembling, while a scream passed through nature. The open mouth registers horror at what is being heard, not the act of shouting. ### Why is the sky red in The Scream? Munch said it really did turn blood-red. Researchers have proposed the volcanic twilights that followed the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, and more recently rare iridescent nacreous clouds seen over Oslo in winter, which better explain the rippling bands. Neither is confirmed, because the date of the walk is unknown. ### How many versions of The Scream are there? Four: two from 1893, a pastel from 1895 and a tempera from 1910\. Munch also made an 1895 lithograph, which is why the image circulated so widely so early. Three of the four are in Oslo, split between the National Museum and the Munch Museum; the 1895 pastel is privately owned. ### What does the hidden inscription on The Scream say? In pencil across the red sky of the 1893 version in Oslo, in Norwegian: can only have been painted by a madman. It was assumed for a century to be vandalism. In 2021 the National Museum of Norway used infrared scanning and handwriting analysis to confirm that Munch wrote it himself. ### Where can you see The Scream? The 1893 tempera and crayon version hangs at the National Museum in Oslo. The unfinished 1893 crayon version and the 1910 tempera are at the Munch Museum, also in Oslo. The 1895 pastel is privately owned and appears in public only on loan. Munch's paintings are in the public domain, so the whole *Frieze of Life* can go on a wall at the size it deserves. Browse [Edvard Munch prints](https://fineartamerica.com/art/edvard+munch?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), the [The Scream](https://fineartamerica.com/art/the+scream?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) collection, or more [Expressionist art](https://fineartamerica.com/art/expressionism?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) on [canvas](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/canvas+prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), [framed paper](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/framed+prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) or [art](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).