Beyond ‘The Scream’: How Edvard Munch Channeled a Timeless Sense of Dread

The Scream is one of the most recognizable—and one of the most parodied—artworks in history, and because of its outsized reputation, it’s now considered Edvard Munch’s masterpiece. But Munch himself never considered it his magus opus. He finished the first version of The Scream in 1893, and his career stretched on for 50 years afterward.
The raw nerves glimpsed in The Scream make it an outlier in Munch’s oeuvre—most of his works accept mortality with a grim re