Don’t Scream for Me, Krakatoa

One of the most cataclysmic volcanic eruptions in history may very well have inspired one of the most iconic paintings of the 19^th century.

Through a combination of forensic astronomy and old-fashioned historical research, Texas State professors Don Olson, Russell Doescher and Marilynn Olson have not only determined where Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) stood when inspired to paint his anguished masterpiece The Scream, but that the lurid red sky triggering his inspiration was a direct result of dust and gasses ejected into the Earth’s upper atmosphere by the violent destruction of the island of Krakatoa half a world away. The team’s complete findings are published in the February 2004 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.

“I was actually looking at Munch’s Starry Night paintings, but kept coming back to The Scream,” Don Olson explained. “The sky in it looked like a Krakatoa twilight. I’m very familiar with the Krakatoa twilights, and my first reaction was, ‘That can’t be,’ because the first versions of The Scream were painted in 1892 and 1893, and Krakatoa erupted in 1883.”

Pursuing his hunch that the vivid sky was the result of a volcanic eruption, the team initially looked for good volcanic candidates that had erupted in the years just prior to 1892. But the looked-for eruption wasn’t there, nor were any records of spectacular sunsets. Instead, the team found that art historians had placed Munch’s twilight experience in a number of different years, some in the mid-1880s.

“Once we realized there was uncertainty, that the original experience could be in the 1880s, that opened up the possibility that Krakatoa was responsible,” Don Olson said.

Munch painted the most famous version of The Scream in 1893 as part of The Frieze of Life, a group of works derived from his personal experiences. The works in The Frieze of Life were painted in the 1890s, but many of them have established origins in the preceding decades.

“The majority of those paintings reflect experiences that happened to Munch many years earlier,” said Don Olson. “The death paintings are particularly clear. Death of the Mother and Death in the Sick Room, done in the 1890s, are based on the death of his mother in 1868 and the death of his sister in 1877. These experiences haunted him the rest of his life, as did the lurid, blood-red sky. So it is totally in character for Munch to be painting an event that happened many years earlier.”

While circumstance supported the team’s theory, they needed more facts to back them up, and that demanded the team make a research trip to Munch’s city of Christiania--modern day Oslo, Norway. In Oslo the Texas State researchers visited the Munch Museum, the National Gallery, the National Library and the Oslo City Museum on their quest.

“Munch left a wealth of paintings, drawings, journals, diaries, lithographs and manuscripts to the Munch Museum,” Don Olson explained. “Most of these materials are unpublished, so it was necessary to travel to Oslo to examine the materials. We wanted to verify the artist’s whereabouts in 1883-84.”

They found more than that--Munch’s papers from the archives at the Munch Museum and the National Library provided the “smoking gun” linking the time of The Scream’s inspiration to that of Krakatoa:

...the first Scream...Kiss...Melancholy....For these a number of rough sketches had already -- in 1885-89 -- been done in that I had written texts for them -- more correctly said, these are illustrations of some memoirs from 1884...

With the time frame of Munch’s inspiration narrowed down to a manageable window, the team began to refine this even further by determining when the Krakatoa twilights would have appeared in the Norwegian sky. Krakatoa destroyed itself on August 27, 1883, with the explosion being heard as far away as Australia and fading swells of tsunamis resulting from the blast reaching the English Channel. Reports from the Royal Society in London and the French journal Comptes Rendus show that the unusual “blood red” twilight spawned by Krakatoa had spread from the tropics to northern latitudes worldwide in the months following the eruption. The spectacular sunsets were visible in the higher latitudes of North America as well, impressing observers in Maine:

For several days past a striking and beautiful phenomenon has accompanied the sunset, and excited much comment. It is a blood-red coloring of the western sky, 10 or 12 degrees high, and appears just after sunset....The effect upon buildings of the reflected light was similar to that of red theatrical flames....

(New York Times, December 1, 1883)

By late November 1883, astronomers Carl Fredrik Fearnley and Hans Geelmuyden at the Christiania Observatory in what is now modern Oslo, Norway, first noticed a “very intense red glow that amazed the observers” which developed into a “red band.” The phenomenon lasted well into 1884.

Between November 1883 through February 1884, the crimson Norwegian sunset in the southwest would match perfectly the topographic features visible in The Scream and several other related paintings, allowing the Texas State team to conclude that Munch based his works on two observations points on Ekeberg hill--one from the historic road lined with railings and skirting the foot of the hill, and another from a rocky ledge 420 feet above, overlooking the harbor. The final, famous version of The Scream combines elements from both of these vantage points.

“One of the high points of our research trip to Oslo came when we rounded a bend in the road and realized we were standing in the exact spot where Munch had been 120 years ago,” Don Olson said. “We found the spot.”

“It was very satisfying to stand in the exact spot where an artist had his experience,” he said. “The real importance of finding the location, though, was to determine the direction of view in the painting. We could see that Munch was looking to the southwest--exactly where the Krakatoa twilights appeared in the winter of 1883-84.”

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ARTICLE: FEBRUARY 8, 2004

'The Scream,' East of Krakatoa

By RICHARD PANEK

So, the blood-red sky in "The Scream" might not have been a pigment of Edvard Munch's imagination after all.

Three researchers report in the February issue of Sky & Telescope that it would have been the color Munch saw as he took a sunset stroll along the Ljabrochausseen road (now Mosseveien) in the port city of Christiania (now Oslo) in late 1883 or early 1884. At that time the detritus from the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa, on Aug. 27, 1883, had just reached Norway.

It happens once in a while that academic sleuths, usually moonlighting from the research and lecturing they do at their day jobs, uncover the literal explanation for a previously mysterious artistic effect. Like many people, they're drawn to a work of art for reasons they can't articulate. But at some point they realize that they have the means to do with these artistic enigmas what the rest of us can't: provide scientific solutions; articulate their reasons.

Monet's water lilies? He had cataracts. Even the mother of all artistic enigmas, the "Mona Lisa" smile, has an explanation. Margaret Livingstone, a neurophysiologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of "Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing," made worldwide headlines three years ago when she announced that the muscles around the mouth in the painting suggest a smile only when we don't look directly at them — which is partly why the smile seems so fleeting and (heretofore) mysterious.

The three Texas State University scholars who traced "The Scream" to its origins — Don Olson and Russell Doescher (physics) and Mr. Olson's wife, Marilynn Olson (English) — have made a cottage industry out of such investigations into works of art, especially relating to astronomy. Last year, they determined that a van Gogh that art historians had titled "Sunset" was in fact a "Moonrise" — and a moonrise over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence on July 13, 1889, at 9:08 p.m. local time, to be exact. Three years ago, Mr. Olson and Mr. Doescher examined van Gogh's "White House at Night," not only identifying the bright object in the sky as Venus but locating the real white house in Auvers — previously a matter of contention even among residents. "We have gone from knowing almost nothing about this beautiful painting," Mr. Olson said at the time, "to knowing almost everything there is to know about it." Well, that depends on your definition of "almost." Mr. Olson was referring to the literal facts behind the painting, and it might be tempting to respond that such literalism does art an injustice -- that reducing the emotional depths of the red in "The Scream" to an atmospheric anomaly robs it of its mystique. And maybe, to some extent, it does.

But to a greater extent, it doesn't. Such literalism can actually add to an artwork's mystique. By helping us identify the part of art that's not a mystery, these efforts help us focus more narrowly on the part that is.

Consider Munch. He wasn't alone in seeing that sky. Contemporary newspaper and scientific accounts make clear, as the Sky & Telescope article says, that due to the fallout from Krakatoa the "end of 1883 and the first months of 1884 had the most spectacular twilights of the last 150years."

Of the scene in New York, The New York Times of Nov. 28, 1883, reported: "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." Two days later, Munch's hometown paper carried this account: "A strong light was seen yesterday and today around 5 o'clock to the west of the city. People believed it was a fire: but it was actually a red refraction in the hazy atmosphere after sunset."

Munch wasn't even alone on his twilight perambulation around Christiania. He wrote in his journal: "I was walking along the road with two friends — then the Sun set — all at once the sky became blood red — and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired — clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city."

Where Munch was alone, though, was in his response. "My friends went on," the journal entry continues, "and I stood alone, trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature."

That's mystery No. 1: why him? Of the three friends walking along the Ljabrochausseen, of the hundreds or thousands strolling the streets of Christiania at that hour, of the millions who must have witnessed similar sunsets around the world during those months, why did one Edvard Munch see in the sky the sound of a scream? What was it about this sight that would haunt him in particular for the better part of a decade? A friend wrote about discussing art with Munch in the winter of 1891-92: "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."

In 1893, Munch succeeded in capturing not only the coloring of the sky on that unforgettable (for him) evening, but the emotion accompanying it. And he succeeded in a way the sky itself did not. It's his sky that has become iconic, immortal. It's his individual emotional response that the two friends who kept walking along a road in Christiania, or the masses who went back to their business in Manhattan, presumably didn't feel — but, judging from the response of generations to come, would have felt if only they'd seen his red instead. And that's mystery No. 2.

The answers to the other questions — why the sky was red, what planet rose over what house, how Leonardo got that effect — satisfy our curiosity about the literal truth. Maybe they even satisfy some desire to demystify art. But they also serve a subtler, perhaps equally unconscious, purpose. They enhance the questions we can't answer, the twin mysteries that arise out of the individual response of one artist in one place and the universal response of all audiences everywhere: Why the "Mona Lisa" smile to begin with? And why will we continue to seek it forever — even when we know it’s not there?

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LINK TO ARTICLE IN: Environmental History (January 2007)

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LINKS

Texas State University Honors Program
http://www.txstate.edu/honors/

Don Olson, Physics Department, Texas State University

http://uweb.txstate.edu/~do01/

Marilynn Olson, English Department, Texas State University

http://www.english.txstate.edu/people-contacts/faculty/olson.html

Christopher Olson, JD, Hawaii Lawyer, Oahu Lawyer, Oahu, Hawaii
http://hawaiiattorneyonline.com/