Munch made the same image four times. The woodcut version is the most honest.
Edvard Munch made The Scream four times: twice in pastel, once in tempera on cardboard, and once as a woodcut. The painting versions are the ones that appear in textbooks and on coffee mugs. The woodcut, made in 1895, is less reproduced and more interesting.
The difference is in the making. Paint is applied. A woodcut is carved — the artist cuts away everything that is not the image, pressing into the grain of the wood, working against resistance. The lines in Munch's woodcut have a quality that paint cannot replicate: they are marks of physical effort. The swirling sky is not brushwork. It is the trace of a gouge moving through wood.
Munch was explicit about what the image meant to him. He described a walk near Oslo at sunset, a sudden overwhelming anxiety, the sense that the landscape was screaming. He was not depicting something external. He was depicting the inside of a nervous system encountering the world.
The woodcut version of The Scream is now in the public domain, and we have put it on the Skriket Zip — the name taken from the Norwegian title Munch gave the work. We chose the woodcut specifically because we think the roughness matters. The painting is an image of distress. The woodcut is made of it.
From the Collection
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