Edvard Munch’s The Scream, is arguably one of the world’s most famous pieces of art. It appears in multiple forms of media, and while not many people know of the work itself, they have seen a form of it somewhere. The scream itself is representative of Munch’s attitude toward a single moment of his life. As he walked along a path and saw the sun setting in such a perfect manor, it for some reason gave him the urge to scream. The work itself consists of one clear figure in the foreground, with a series of swirls and flares in the background. It’s unclear where the sky meets the water, and yet you can clearly tell what is what. It’s almost as if Munch created a perfect balance between abstract and realism.
In comparison to Munch’s The Scream, we have Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. This is another example of mixing abstract with realism. We can clearly tell what is the sky, what is a mountain, and what is a building, and yet all of these finite objects seem to mix and swirl into one another in a sense where they all seem somewhat connected. To contrast the two works, here in The Starry Night, we see a more dominant use of deep blues and greens; darker colors, while there are warm accents of yellow and orange mixed in. While looking at The Scream, the flaming orange background clearly dominates the work, almost to make it just as predominant as the main figure standing in the dead center of the piece. There are also accents of cool blues and darker pastels running through out the piece, yet none as dominant as the bursting sky in the background.
The two works The Scream and The Starry Night share very similar features, in that they both use a combination of both realism and abstract. Where in both works, there is no trouble seeing what objects are within them, the boundaries of these objects can be argued. What is sky, what is water, what is a person, what is a building, what is a mountain? All of these questions are easily answerable, however these objects flow into one another in a sense where you begin to doubt yourself.
