The Scream, East of Krakatoa
By RICHARD PANEK
Published: February 8, 2004
So, the blood-red sky in "The Scream" might not have been a pigment of Edvard Munch's imagination after all.
Three researchers report in the February issue of Sky & Telescope that it would have been the color Munch saw as he took a sunset stroll along the Ljabrochausseen road (now Mosseveien) in the port city of Christiania (now Oslo) in late 1883 or early 1884. At that time the detritus from the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa, on Aug. 27, 1883, had just reached Norway.
It happens once in a while that academic sleuths, usually moonlighting from the research and lecturing they do at their day jobs, uncover the literal explanation for a previously mysterious artistic effect. Like many people, they're drawn to a work of art for reasons they can't articulate. But at some point they realize that they have the means to do with these artistic enigmas what the rest of us can't: provide scientific solutions; articulate their reasons.
Monet's water lilies? He had cataracts. Even the mother of all artistic enigmas, the "Mona Lisa" smile, has an explanation. Margaret Livingstone, a neurophysiologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of "Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing," made worldwide headlines three years ago when she announced that the muscles around the mouth in the painting suggest a smile only when we don't look directly at them — which is partly why the smile seems so fleeting and (heretofore) mysterious.
The three Texas State University scholars who traced "The Scream" to its origins — Don Olson and Russell Doescher (physics) and Mr. Olson's wife, Marilynn Olson (English) — have made a cottage industry out of such investigations into works of art, especially relating to astronomy. Last year, they determined that a van Gogh that art historians had titled "Sunset" was in fact a "Moonrise" — and a moonrise over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence on July 13, 1889, at 9:08 p.m. local time, to be exact. Three years ago, Mr. Olson and Mr. Doescher examined van Gogh's "White House at Night," not only identifying the bright object in the sky as Venus but locating the real white house in Auvers — previously a matter of contention even among residents.
"We have gone from knowing almost nothing about this beautiful painting," Mr. Olson said at the time, "to knowing almost everything there is to know about it."
Well, that depends on your definition of "almost." Mr. Olson was referring to the literal facts behind the painting, and it might be tempting to respond that such literalism does art an injustice — that reducing the emotional depths of the red in "The Scream" to an atmospheric anomaly robs it of its mystique. And maybe, to some extent, it does.
But to a greater extent, it doesn't. Such literalism can actually add to an artwork's mystique. By helping us identify the part of art that's not a mystery, these efforts help us focus more narrowly on the part that is.
Consider Munch. He wasn't alone in seeing that sky. Contemporary newspaper and scientific accounts make clear, as the Sky & Telescope article says, that due to the fallout from Krakatoa the "end of 1883 and the first months of 1884 had the most spectacular twilights of the last 150 years."
Of the scene in New York, The New York Times of Nov. 28, 1883, reported: "Soon after 5 o'clock the western horizon suddenly flamed into a brilliant scarlet, which crimsoned sky and clouds. People in the streets were startled at the unwonted sight and gathered in little groups on all the corners to gaze into the west. Many thought that a great fire was in progress." Two days later, Munch's hometown paper carried this account: "A strong light was seen yesterday and today around 5 o'clock to the west of the city. People believed it was a fire: but it was actually a red refraction in the hazy atmosphere after sunset."
Munch wasn't even alone on his twilight perambulation around Christiania. He wrote in his journal: "I was walking along the road with two friends — then the Sun set — all at once the sky became blood red — and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired — clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city."
Where Munch was alone, though, was in his response. "My friends went on," the journal entry continues, "and I stood alone, trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature."
That's mystery No. 1: why him? Of the three friends walking along the Ljabrochausseen, of the hundreds or thousands strolling the streets of Christiania at that hour, of the millions who must have witnessed similar sunsets around the world during those months, why did one Edvard Munch see in the sky the sound of a scream? What was it about this sight that would haunt him in particular for the better part of a decade? A friend wrote about discussing art with Munch in the winter of 1891-92: "For a long time he had wanted to paint the memory of a sunset. Red as blood. No, it was coagulated blood. But no one else would perceive it the same way he did. They would think only about clouds."
In 1893, Munch succeeded in capturing not only the coloring of the sky on that unforgettable (for him) evening, but the emotion accompanying it. And he succeeded in a way the sky itself did not. It's his sky that has become iconic, immortal. It's his individual emotional response that the two friends who kept walking along a road in Christiania, or the masses who went back to their business in Manhattan, presumably didn't feel — but, judging from the response of generations to come, would have felt if only they'd seen his red instead. And that's mystery No. 2.
The answers to the other questions — why the sky was red, what planet rose over what house, how Leonardo got that effect — satisfy our curiosity about the literal truth. Maybe they even satisfy some desire to demystify art. But they also serve a subtler, perhaps equally unconscious, purpose. They enhance the questions we can't answer, the twin mysteries that arise out of the individual response of one artist in one place and the universal response of all audiences everywhere: Why the "Mona Lisa" smile to begin with? And why will we continue to seek it forever — even when we know its not there?
Richard Panek is the author of "The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes," to be published this summer by Viking.