Munch's "The Scream"

Edward Munch's painting "The Scream" (1893) appears to fit both within definitions of modernist and postmodernist art, particularly given its reproduction in contemporary society. However, an analysis of such definitions followed by a review of the way in which the contemporary viewer interacts with the image of "The Scream" actually suggests that Munch's painting is, in fact, modern and our reproductions of it are merely postmodern renderings of an inherently unrepresentable image.

Martin Jay points out in "Scopic Regimes of Modernity" that Western culture uniquely privileges the visual (Jay, 3). He argues that what he terms "Cartesian perspectivalism" has been the dominant visual model of the modern era. Jay traces the privileging of linear perspective, "as divine lux rather than perceived lumen," the idea of the canvas as a transparent window or a flat mirror. Essentially, the viewed image was a reflection, an epiphany. The painter's gaze captured "an eternal moment," while the viewing subject "unites his gaze with the Founding Perception in a moment of perfect recreation of that first epiphany" (Jay, 7). Art in Cartesian perspectivalism, therefore, was not borne from the artist's imagination. Rather, it was divinely channeled through the artist. The image on the canvas was not representative of the artist, and its reception did not depend on the viewer. Rather, the image on the canvas represented what was.