The Scream is the title of a series of paintings and lithographs created by Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch between 1893 and1910. Depicting a tormented, sexless, distorted individual against a blood red sky, the now iconic image of The Scream remains at the center of tremendous conjecture in the art community to this day.

Substantial clues into the roots of The Scream stem from Munch’s personal diary, in which he writes on January 22, 1892, “I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the 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.”

It is widely accepted that the landscape in the background of The Scream depicts the view of Oslofjord in Oslo, Norway from the hill of Ekeberg; Edvard Munch’s sister Laura Catherine was, at the time of the series’ genesis, receiving treatment for manic-depression at the mental institution at the base of Ekeberg. The relationship between these two facts forms the base of one of the numerous theories attempting to arrive at a more specific and concrete understanding of the image’s meaning.

The Scream is widely acknowledged to be the most famous of Edvard Munch’s works, and as such many attempts have been made to steal it’s various iterations worldwide. Two versions, one at the National Gallery in Lillehammer, Norway during the 1994 Olympics and another at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway in 2004, were successfully stolen. In both cases, tremendous efforts on an international scale brought the pieces home essentially unscathed.

A series as relevant now as at the time of it’s conception, The Scream continues to be satirized and referenced in contemporary popular culture. “The Scream” holds fans ranging from Andy Warhol, who used Edvard Munch’s image in a series of Silk Prints in the early-mid nineteen-eighties, to Hollywood, where references to “The Scream” can be found in Wes Anderson’s aptly titled “Scream” film trilogy as well as the wildly popular television show “The Simpsons.”

Edvard Munch, in his conceptualization and realization of The Scream, introduced a masterpiece of the human psyche which continues to resonate as intensely today as it did over a hundred years ago. Unsettling, disturbing, and terrifying, Edvard Munch’s image is ultimately breathtaking simply in it’s fundamentally relatable treatment of one of the most primal of human acts: “The Scream.”