Edvard Munch’s The Scream is not the Mona Lisa. This may sound obvious, and in one sense it is; but the news that one of the four versions of the Symbolist masterpiece is to be sold at auction in New York this May, for an estimated $80-million, is a good opportunity to reflect on the fractured nature of the work.
First of all, there is no single painting known as The Scream. Multiplicity is built into existence from the start, as the Norwegian master experimented with materials and details of composition. We all think we know The Scream, but what is The Scream we think we know?
This photo provided by Sotheby's shows The Scream by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. The work dates from 1895 and is one of four versions of the composition.— AP
The Mona Lisa is a better fit for the kind of warning Walter Benjamin issued in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Mass duplication threatens to dispel the special aura clinging to the singular work of genius. Throngs of people still mass in front of, or near, Da Vinci’s glass-protected signature work (itself an example of portraiture that takes on a life of its own) but it’s doubtful they experience anything auratic. The main reason to visit the Mona Lisa is so you can complain that there were too many people there to see the Mona Lisa.
The Scream has other resonances, even though it has been reproduced at least as often as the Mona Lisa. Its iconic status accrues not because of its relation to genius so much as its universal resonance. Here, we see the tortured face of the modern age prefigured, its silent howl a haunting depiction of alienation and dread in the face of … well, pick your favourite candidate: middle-class conformity, war, technological change, cultural confusion, ideological strife, the intellectual wasteland of the Internet, whatever.
Which is just to say that iconicity is a cultural quality, not an aesthetic one, and has as much to do with accidents of history as with the history of art. The Scream works because it is at once sharply delineated, an unforgettable image produced in a hothouse fin-de-siècle moment, and as open-ended as Mona Lisa’s ambiguous mouth-not-eyes smile.
Of course, the cycles of aesthetic production and consumption being what they are, you could not forget this image even if you wanted to. There are at least five levels operating in the reproductive economy of The Scream, each necessary to its status as the quintessential post-postmodern artwork. (I know, I know; but I will explain.)
First, of course, is Munch’s own urge to replicate. I saw The Scream at the Art Gallery of Ontario some years ago, but I don’t know which of the four “originals” it was. Second is what we might call the straightforward proliferation of the image, in posters and postcards you can buy at the gallery gift shop or those sales held every September on college campuses.
Nothing novel there: The same fate has befallen Monet, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Klimt, Van Gogh, and many others. But The Scream has also, third, insinuated itself into less obviously aesthetic copies: on coffee mugs and fridge magnets, kites and finger puppets, even (one of my favourites) an inflatable toy that carries the excellent warning that it is “not to be used as a flotation device.”
Then comes the genius move, off-loading The Scream into a wholly new form, the fourth level, where reproduction is no longer based on image. For that inflatable comes with a companion piece, a matching body complete with Munch’s swirling brushstrokes, but now rendered in yellow hues and sporting on top, instead of the anguished face and collapsed-O mouth, a familiar circular happy face.
