When the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) unveiled his masterpiece The Scream in 1893, it was at a time of seismic economic, social and intellectual upheaval. Western Civilization had entered a twenty-year identity crisis that would culminate in the First World War..
Four years prior to The Scream, Europe had been beset by a severe economic downturn beginning with a recession in France. Shortly thereafter, markets declined in Germany and the UK. When the eminent banking house, Baring Brothers, ceased its operations due to being unable to call in sizable loans from Argentina, panic set in among capitalists around the world. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States plunged into its first depression in the same year The Scream was released. Dangerous speculation in the railroad industry caused a nearly wholesale financial collapse which resulted in six years (1893-1898) of massive unemployment and massive hardship for millions of Americans. Neither Europe nor the United States would rebound economically until the end of the century.
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By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, not only had Queen Victoria (1819-1901) died but God has also been proclaimed 'dead' in one form or another by the influential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in two of his books The Gay Science (1883) and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885). When the noted intellectual Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) published The Quest for The Historical Jesus in 1906 (translated into English and published in 1910), he concluded his study with the following bombshell,
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"The Jesus of Nazareth who came forth publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth and died to give his work final consecration, never existed. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in historical garb."
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From the evidence, Schweitzer had rendered a radical verdict on Jesus and Christianity. They were simply inventions by religious elites, and these historical and theological constructions had been reproduced through the centuries by the unquestioning faith of the masses. The Victorian order, which had been founded on the traditions and the ethics of Christianity, had been smashed - or at least severely diminished in the eyes of the literati and the middle classes. When the English novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) proclaimed "On or about December 1910, human character changed" in 1924, she was probably not far off the mark in her analysis. An existential crisis had overspread much of the Atlantic world - a world increasingly defined by uncertainty and naked power as conceived by Social Darwinism (survival of the fittest).
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In the absence of God, what meaning could be constructed for mankind or any individual in a world of boom and bust economies, imperialism, war and political and social repression? From this transatlantic malaise, a new generation of talented writers, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), emerged. In their fine works of literature, they attempted to locate the source of the collective 'scream' that had preceded and perhaps had partly caused the The Great War (1914-1918) - a holocaust that resulted in 15 million dead and another 20 million wounded.
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Between 1893-1910, the West underwent a traumatic search for a new identity. In the process, it ushered in a period of intense creativity and sowed the seeds of tragic destruction - en route to rediscovering rational thought and human rights.
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Beyond its captivating color and expressive style, Munch brilliantly captured the troubled zeitgeist of his time - and perhaps all time - making The Scream an enduring work of art - and of life.
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(Image: Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893. Click on to enlarge.)
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J Roquen