“The Scream” by Edvard Munch
One of the most famous paintings in the world is “The Scream” by Edvard Munch from 1893. It features a man with his hands on his face, screaming into oblivion. In the painting itself, Munch wrote a secret message that said, “Can only have been painted by a madman.”in the upper left hand corner. Art scholars believe that he wrote that on his painting after his first exhibit, which was scrutinized by critics very harshly. This actually may have been a quote from one of the nasty comments he received for his work. And it’s true that Edvard Munch suffered from mental illness, because he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown several years later, in 1908. Munch once wrote, “For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety, which I have tried to express in my art.”