CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/20/2016

Edvard Munch: Archetypes

One of the most iconic and powerful images in the history of art, Edvard Munch's "The Scream" is reproduced here in the form of an 1895 lithograph featured in Thyssen-Bornemisza's glorious new survey of Archetypes in the artist's work. In this case, the illustration is associated with the archetype of panic; other archetypes include melancholy, death, woman, melodrama, love, nocturnes, Vitalism and nudes. "Munch suffered a terrible fear of multitudes and, like many of his contemporaries, always imagined the urban world as a place of stress and turmoil in which people are subjected to a traumatic experience," Paloma Alarco writes. "In 'The Scream,' the archetypal image par excellence of that existential angst, he seems to challenge Schopenhauer, who situated the limits of the expressive powers of art at its inability to 'make audible' the scream—precisely the title that Munch gave to his painting."