“I was walking along the road with two friends.

The sun was setting.

I felt a breath of melancholy -

Suddenly the sky turned blood-red.

I stopped, and leaned against the railing, deathly tired -

looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword

over the blue-black fjord and town.

My friends walked on – I stood there, trembling with fear.

And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature.”

Edvard Munch, written in his journal in 1892.

Edvard Munch - The Scream, 1893.

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60You, Jasjit Singh Nanda, Nisar Lala and 57 others

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Sushama Karnik

All art is a frantic human's pain at the desperation to reach across to the reader, audience, viewer whose senses are dumb, deaf and blind all at once. Intense art cannot be divorced from life and its suffering. We cannot pretend that we are normal, better, and wiser and more fortunate in life than the (seemingly mad) artist who makes the perennial scream an epitome of art. Munch and many, almost all artists have tried to come to terms with the suffering in their life. In fact suffering and anxiety were the causes that brought into existence their art. It is amazing how Munch was able to capture the universality of the scream in a single frame.

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