Great Art Explained

The Scream

Between 1863 when Munch was born and the years before the first world war, European cities were going through unprecedented change. Industrialization and economic change brought anxieties and obsessions, political unrest, and radicalism. Questions about society and the changing role of man within it, about our psyche, our social responsibilities, and most radical of all, questions about the existence of God. This is a period of Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzche. This is also the period that Munch painted The Scream.