Edvard Munch created The Scream in 1893 in response to an intense emotional experience. Crippling and anxiety-inducing, this primal cry was a rallying call for Munch and for the wider world of art. It gave birth to a movement known as expressionism, showing life not as it is (realism) or as it might be perceived in a fleeting moment (impressionism), but as it is experienced within the unembellished core of our being.

Charting the origins of expressionism and its historical context, this multifaceted talk embraces artists and thinkers such as Kandinsky, Klee and Schiele, Nietzsche, Freud and Schoenberg, pondering the radical ways in which they reflected and ignited our inner feelings.   

IMAGES: Sigmund Freud (by Max Halberstadt) and 'The Scream' by Munch (1893, The National Gallery of Norway). Both courtesy of the lecturer.