Research Paper on:
Reactive Analysis of Edvard Munch’s Painting, “The Scream” (or “The Cry”):

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
era suddenly seemed woefully out of place. People were no longer simply content to reveal social masks to the world; they wanted to outwardly express the conflicting emotions they  were feeling within. In Paris, an Austrian physician by the name of Sigmund Freud was studying human hysteria, which would later branch out into a distinctive school of psychology  known as psychoanalysis. In Norway, dramatist Henrik Ibsen was staging plays of social realism, in which characters actions were based not on cold, calculated reason but passionate emotions.  Throughout the course of history, as Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (1997) observed in their introduction to Emotion and the Arts, "Art and emotion are inextricably linked" (p. 3).  By the 1890s, Norwegian-born painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944), whose style is unquestionably influenced by Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, as evidenced by his chaotic brushstrokes and bold use of  color, was an emotionally fragile young artist was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Rather than deny or suppress what he was feeling, Munch utilized his turmoil as  a creative outlet. His 1893 painting, "The Scream" (also sometimes referred to as "The Cry"), is an important artistic transition from post-Impressionism to Expressionism, and represents a dramatic shift  from painting conveying their impressions of the world to actually pouring out their emotions onto canvases. Upon first glance, "The Scream" (which can be viewed at URL http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/munch)  literally assaults the viewers senses with emotion. Its composition is an evocative combination of "dramatic perspective and swirling planar color (like the earlier picture of the same name) but  it also moves both inwards and outward" (Goldwater, 1998, p. 226). The focal point is an alien-like figure whose contorted face is the picture of tortured desperation (Goldwater, 1998).