The Scream

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By Dr. Marco Benavides /


It's one of the most famous paintings in the world—yet what the artist meant to capture is far stranger than what most people assume.

Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893. At first glance, it seems to show a figure crying out in terror. But look closer at those hands: they're pressed against the ears, not the mouth. The face isn't screaming—it's trying to shut something out.

Munch's original title offers a clue. In German he called it Der Schrei der Natur—"The Scream of Nature." The cry doesn't come from the figure at all. It comes from the world itself. He is merely the one person unlucky enough to hear it.

He set down the origin of that feeling in a diary entry—one of the most unsettling things an artist has ever written about his own work:

"I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. I stopped, tired, and leaned against a 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."

That is the painting's true subject—not a monster, not a nightmare, but a moment nearly everyone has lived through: when the ordinary world suddenly turns strange and hostile, when a wave of dread swallows everything, and you find yourself utterly alone, because the people beside you feel nothing at all.

Munch wasn't painting a monster. He was painting anxiety itself.

And there's one more thing—a secret the painting kept for over a century. In the upper left corner, someone had written in pencil, in Norwegian: "Could only have been painted by a madman." For a hundred years, no one knew whose hand it was. In 2021, Norway's National Museum used infrared scanning to compare the handwriting against Munch's letters and diaries, and confirmed what few had dared to guess: Munch had written it himself.

He wrote it on his own masterpiece—almost certainly a bitter, wounded reply to those who'd already called him mad. Munch spent his entire life turning that inner darkness into art, and in the end he named, plainly, what he had been painting all along. He called it "the study of the soul."


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