The Scream (After Munch)

The Scream (After Munch) is a unique work that speaks abundantly of Warhol's obsession with celebrity, advertising and mass media. As the foremost proponent of Pop Art, Warhol had long taken images and objects from popular culture and smuggled them into the realms of High Art. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, though, he began to reverse the process in two ways. On the one hand, he began to turn to his own former subjects, revisiting them knowingly, in a sense pointing to the fact that old Warhols had themselves entered popular culture. And on the other hand, he turned to supposedly 'high' subjects and rendered them in his incongruous silkscreens. Leonardo, Botticelli and here Munch all had their art transformed, featuring fresh colours, given a contemporary spin that somehow also removed some veneer of dignity.
In an attempt to mitigate the overloaded sense of struggle inherent in the original painting by Munch, Warhol's The Scream (After Munch) features a duality of colours that injects into this piece a de-contracted sense of moving freshness and post-modernity. Such a transformation instantly highlights the realm of the artificial, the mass-produced and the industrial within which Andy Warhol thrived. Seen in this light, The Scream (After Munch) exemplifies the Warholian twist of appropriation.