Andy Warhol

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York

Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2009)

Sotheby's, London, 26 March 2019, lot 142

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Humlebæk, Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Warhol After Munch, June - September 2010

Frayda Feldman and Jorg Schellmann, Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1987, New York 2003, F. & S. IIIA.58, illustration in colour of another example

I was walking along the road with two friends. The Sun was setting – The Sky turned a bloody red And I felt a whiff of Melancholy – I stood Still, deathly tired – over the blue-black Fjord and City hung Blood and Tongues of Fire My Friends walked on – I remained behind – shivering with Anxiety – I felt the great Scream in Nature

(Edvard Munch, Poem hand-painted on the reverse of The Scream, 1895)

Few works are as instantly recognisable, powerful, and emotionally charged as The Scream. Since its creation in the 1890s, Edvard Munch’s haunting depiction of existential dread has become a cultural touchstone, echoing far beyond fine art into film, fashion, and advertising. Over a century after it was painted, Andy Warhol would revisit this modernist masterpiece, bringing his distinctive voice to Munch’s anguished vision to give rise to a new iconic rendition of The Scream.

At first glance, the twentieth-century icons appear worlds apart. A closer consideration of Andy Warhol’s After Munch series, however, reveals that the Pop pioneer and his printmaking predecessor were, in fact, kindred spirits. Warhol’s connection to Munch was deep and long-standing; he famously cited the Norwegian painter as “his absolute favourite artist, alongside Matisse” (Tone Lyngstad Nyaas, ed., Munch by Others, Oslo 2012, p. 12). Munch’s oeuvre was shaped by many of the same philosophical preoccupations that would later define Warhol, and both artists embraced colour and repetition as tools for probing psychological and emotional complexity.

Warhol began reflecting on art history as early as 1963 by reproducing its most ubiquitous image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in a series of paintings; however, it wasn’t until 1973 that Warhol first encountered Munch’s prints during a tour of Oslo. There he developed an affinity for the painter-printmaker’s experimental woodcuts and lithographs at the National Gallery and Munch Museet. Dazzled by Munch’s woodcuts and lithographs, Warhol began collecting his prints immediately. The two artists reunited in New York a decade later when Warhol fatefully happened upon a Munch retrospective at Galleri Bellman just minutes away from Warhol Enterprises. Impressed by the 126 paintings and graphic works on view, Warhol returned to Bellman repeatedly, especially captivated by the Norwegian’s experimental prints. Bellman eventually commissioned their frequent visitor to create 15 paintings after Munch artworks of his choice.

Warhol elected to emulate four of Munch’s best-known lithographs, re-interpreting them on canvas for the series Art from Art: The Scream, The Brooch. Eva Mudocci, Madonna, and Self-Portrait. Delighted with Warhol’s results, Galleri Bellman then proposed that he collaborate with the renowned printer Rupert Jasen Smith to create After Munch screenprint portfolios in a similar Pop-infused vein. Warhol was meant to create an edition of 180 portfolios, each comprising three screenprints, plus 36 artist’s proofs. The project was halted, however, when the gallery closed unexpectedly, leaving the artist with an unknown number of trial proofs in unique colours.

This iconic subject is an expression of the 'great, ceaseless scream passing through nature', and considered the most profound representation of man’s existential angst. Just as he did in Race Riots, Electric Chairs and Death and Disaster series, Warhol ignores the emotional content, and concentrated instead on the work as a symbol of popular culture. Just as Marcel Duchamp and Warhol himself has done with Mona Lisa, he made the most famous expressionist painting his own. In a move of postmodern brilliance, Warhol mastered the screenprinting technique and use of colour to present the viewer with an advanced interpretation of the human condition of the twentieth century.

“Executed in a nervous line, it almost seems as if Warhol was working in an imaginary collaboration with the dead artist, rather than attempting to ‘improve’ upon the drawings Munch himself made on the lithograph stones.”

(Tone Lyngstad Nyaas quoted in Ibid., p.13)

In Warhol’s hands, The Scream became not just a reproduction but a reinterpretation. He used several different screens to build the rich, pulsating background to create a disjointed, unsettling effect. In the present work, the intense yellow sky coupled with the lilac and tangerine water, contrasted with the bright red, ghastly yellow figure create a striking and unnerving atmosphere. We experience a vivid scene, a glimpse of Warhol’s perception of the world, which is filled with synthetic colour and psychedelic revelry, but is ultimately lonely. For Warhol, this image resonated with his own preoccupation with fear, death, and the fragility of fame and identity—themes that were central to his output after the 1960s and which are thus quintessentially Warhol.