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.

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is not fragmented. Everything is connected, though it is clearly no representation of any naturally occurring connection. Viewers of "The Scream" can clearly sense Munch's own horror in this painting. Nevertheless, they can sense, too, their own terrified inner selves. The painting, therefore, operates as both a self-portrait of the artist and a mirror of the viewer's self. The painting is, therefore, appears both modern and post-modern, simultaneously. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the postmodern as that which denies a consensus and a collective understanding (Lyotard, 81). Each of the "modern" scopic regimes described by Jay assumed the existence of a fixed, knowable object in the created image. But postmodernism rejects the idea of a single objective image in favor of as many subjective images as there are viewers: "A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment" (Lyotard, 81). Edward Munch's "Scream," therefore, could seem to mean what each viewer understands it to mean. The melancholy and terror that led to Munch's paintings are undeniab
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Approximate Word count = 1868
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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