Marilynn S. Olson, Donald W. Olson, and Russell L. Doescher | Gallery: Marilynn S. Olson, Donald W. Olson, and Russell L. Doescher on the Blood-Red Sky of Munch's The Scream | Environmental History, 12.1

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MARILYNN S. OLSON, DONALD W. OLSON, AND RUSSELL L. DOESCHER ON THE BLOOD-RED SKY OF MUNCH?S THE SCREAM

THE PAINTER EDVARD MUNCH (1863–1944) wrote copiously about his emotions and artistic process. As a result, art historians know the precise moment of the "great unending scream ... through nature" that inspired his most famous work. He wrote "I was walking along the road with two friends—the Sun set—and I felt a touch of melancholy—all at once the sky became blood red—I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired—flaming clouds hung like blood and a sword above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends went on—I stood there, trembling with anxiety—and I felt as though a great, unending scream was piercing through nature."¹

Another version provides more details about the location and the remarkable colors: "One evening I was walking out along a mountain road near Christiania [now Oslo]—together with two companions ... the Sun went down ... it was as if a flaming sword of blood slashed open the vault of heaven—the atmosphere turned to blood—with glaring tongues of fire—the hills became deep blue—the fjord shaded into cold blue—among the yellow and red colors—that garish blood-red—on the road—and the railing—my companions' faces became yellow-white—I felt something like a great scream—and truly I heard a great scream."² The 1893 painting which resulted, The Scream, captured a single moment of personal anguish which has come to stand for the terror of modern life. Yet Munch's masterpiece (a color reproduction of the painting appears on the cover of this issue) was inspired by a specific worldwide environmental phenomenon, the red skies of 1883–1884, produced when the volcanic Indonesian island of Krakatoa exploded, sending volcanic aerosols into the atmosphere.³ The environmental roots of Munch's most famous creation thus reveal powerful connections between art, nature, and history, all of them intertwined in the shared human experience of a spectacular sky.

Courtesy the National Gallery, Oslo /The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society, New York.

Munch never forgot that sunset, and during his lifetime he wrote many accounts of this memorable evening. He showed no interest at all, however, in the material causes of the blood-red skies. In the winter of 1891–1892, Munch discussed the event with his friend Christian Skredsvig, whose memoir helps to explicate the process of life becoming art. "For a long time he had wanted to paint the memory of a sunset. Red as blood. No, it was coagulated blood. But no one else would perceive it the same way he did. They would think only about clouds. He talked himself sick of this sight that had gripped him with terror. With sadness, because the paltry resources of painting were not adequate. 'He is striving after the impossible and has despair as his religion,' I thought but I advised him to paint it—and so he painted his remarkable 'Scream.'"⁴

At the time of the Krakatoa skies, however, other witnesses reacted with scientific questions. From August 27, 1883, through early 1884, as the volcanic aerosols spread around the world, many observers noted the magnificent fiery sunsets and sunrises which appeared first in the southern hemisphere, then near the equator, and eventually in northern latitudes. A report issued by the Royal Society in London devoted more than two hundred pages to "Unusual Optical Phenomena of the Atmosphere," with a section collecting the "Descriptions of the Unusual Twilight Glows in Various Parts of the World, in 1883–4."⁵ Scientific journals and newspapers published hundreds of such accounts. The effects had reached New York by November 28, 1883, as reported in the New York Times: "Soon after 5 o'clock the western horizon suddenly flamed into a brilliant scarlet, which crimsoned sky and clouds. People in the streets were startled at the unwonted sight and gathered in little groups on all the corners to gaze into the west. Many thought that a great fire was in progress.... people were standing on their steps and gazing from their windows as well as from the streets to wonder at the unusual sight. The clouds gradually deepened to a bloody red hue, and a sanguinary flush was on the sea."⁶ Colored stripes and bands in the sky, like those later painted in The Scream, appeared to Pennsylvania residents, who "witnessed a most beautiful and startling phenomenon in the eastern heavens.... The sky that morning was fairly aglow with crimson and golden fires, when suddenly, to their great astonishment, an immense American flag, composed of the national colors, stood out in bold relief high in the heavens, continuing in view for a considerable length of time."⁷

The Krakatoa explosion—and the skies that followed— thus became worldwide environmental events. As Simon Winchester explains in Krakatoa, the volcanic eruption was the first major disaster to occur after the laying of the transoceanic telegraph cables. The explosion was known in England almost immediately.⁸ It was not realized immediately, however, that the lurid sunsets were associated with the volcanic eruption. The correspondents who wrote to Nature and the London Times or contributed to the Royal Society study were part of a process of hypothesizing and testing that included examining the sunsets and sunrises with spectroscopes, and sampling "dust" in snowfall and rainfall, while wondering whether "dust" could remain suspended so long in the air.⁹ They postulated that the Earth had encountered a meteoric cloud in space or that the tail of a gigantic comet had engulfed the Earth.¹⁰ The letter writers also made comparisons between the crimson sunsets and the more familiar phenomena of the zodiacal light, aurora borealis, and crepuscular rays.¹¹ On December 8, 1883, J. Norman Lockyer, founding editor of Nature, concluded in a long article to the London Times that "although à priori it seems difficult to imagine that a sunset in London in December should owe its coloration to a volcanic eruption which took place many thousand miles away last August, inquiries along several lines based upon the evidence now available really lends great probability to this view."¹² Lockyer wrote, however, to encourage just such testing and collecting of evidence and ideas.

Munch's dismissive "they would think only about clouds" is easily understandable as an argument for the validity of his vision and subjectivity in the most moving interpretation of a Krakatoa sunset. It is Munch who articulated a century's anguish, but his point of view was idiosyncratic. Most of his contemporaries preferred science as their lens of interpretation. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English religious poet, for example, was among the many correspondents describing the blood-red sunsets (and doing some of his observations from Stonyhurst Observatory in Lancashire).¹³ Alfred Lord Tennyson's verses, roughly contemporaneous with the actual painting of The Scream, looked back upon the events of 1883 with both scientific theory and poetic image intact:

Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak
Been hurl'd so high they ranged about the globe?
For day by day, thro' many a blood-red eve ...
The wrathful sunset glared.¹⁴

Lockyer's premise that if the volcanic theory was proven "the beauties of the skies will have a new interest attached to them" probably was true for many Victorians.¹⁵ Few of Munch's contemporaries viewed the blood-red skies with his anguish; they preferred the discourse of science. A "lady residing at San Rafael" whose correspondence concluded "Every evening one might suppose that the woods beyond the hills west of us were all on fire. This redness sometimes continues after daylight has departed," was rather peremptory with the editors of the Times: "We are waiting to hear some explanation of the phenomena."¹⁶

Marilynn S. Olson teaches in the English department, and Donald W. Olson and Russell L. Doescher in the physics department, at Texas State University. The authors have written about the skies in paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch and in photographs by Ansel Adams, as part of a series of articles that have appeared in Sky & Telescope over the last two decades.

NOTES

^1. Arne Eggum, Livsfrisen fra Maleri til Grafikk [The Frieze of Life from Painting to Graphic Art] (Oslo: Stenersens Forlag, 1990), 221; the passage is from a Munch Museum manuscript dated January 22, 1892, in Munch's hand.

^2. Eggum, Livsfrisen, 225; the passage is from a Munch Museum manuscript dated to 1908 by Eggum.

^3. The connection between the Krakatoa eruption and the sky of The Scream was made by Donald W. Olson, Russell L. Doescher, and Marilynn S. Olson, "When the Sky Ran Red: The Story Behind The Scream," Sky & Telescope 107 (February 2004): 28–35. As our article was in press, we discovered that the first to suggest that The Scream showed a red volcanic sunset was Alan Robock, "Volcanic Eruptions and Climate," Reviews of Geophysics 38 (May 2000): 191–219; see, in particular, 197. But Robock identified the Awu eruption of June 7, 1892, which falls after the time when Munch had already produced written accounts of the red skies; see note 1.

^4. Christian Skredsvig, Dager og naetter blandt kunstnere [Days and Nights Among the Artists] (1908, reprint; Oslo: Gyldendal, 3rd ed., 1943), 152.

^5. G. J. Symons, ed., The Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena, Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society (London: Trübner & Co., 1888), 151–463. Symons solicited reports from observers in his letter "The Krakatoa Eruption," Nature, February 14, 1884, 355.

^6.New York Times, November 28, 1883, 2.

^7. Story from the Hanover, Pennsylvania, Spectator, reprinted as "The Stars and Stripes in the Sky" in the Austin, Texas, Statesman, December 20, 1883.

^8. Simon Winchester, Krakatoa, The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 181–95.

^9. On testing with spectroscopes, see Times (London), December 14, 1883, 4; December 20, 1883, 6; December 22, 1883, 7; and Nature, December 20, 1883, 180. On sampling "dust," see Nature, December 6, 1883, 131; New York Times, December 16, 1883, 6; and Times (London), December 17, 1883, 10; December 18, 1883, 7. On dust suspended in the air, see Times (London), December 11, 1883, 2; December 17, 1883, 6; December 18, 1883, 7.

^10. On speculation on a meteoric cloud, see Times (London), December 11, 1883, 2; December 12, 1883, 10; New York Times, December 4, 1883, 8; and Nature, July 24, 1884, 304. On speculation on a comet tail, see the New York Times, November 30, 1883, 1.

^11.Times (London), December 5, 1883, 5; December 13, 1883, 4; Nature, November 29, 1883, 103; December 6, 1883, 130; December 20, 1883, 175, 180.

^12. J. Norman Lockyer, "The Recent Sunrises and Sunsets," Times (London), December 8, 1883, 10.

^13. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Nature, November 15, 1883, 55; January 3, 1884, 222–23; October 30, 1884, 633. See also chapter 5, "The Spectacular Sunsets of the 1880s," in Tom Zaniello, Hopkins in the Age of Darwin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), 118–29.

^14. Alfred Tennyson, "St. Telemachus" [1892], in The Works of Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1925).

^15. Lockyer, "The Recent Sunrises and Sunsets."

^16.Times (London), December 28, 1883, 3.

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