Edvard Munch art history lesson

When I was in high school, my youth pastor used The Scream as the theme for a youth retreat. And then it became a thing in pop culture. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that, but there are all sorts of great parodies of The Scream (which I’ll link to some in this art history lesson). Our Edvard Munch art history lesson focused on The Scream, because it’s his most famous work, but I could totally see a lesson where you work on creating your own parody, or another history lesson where you compare his artwork to other impressionists. All in all, there was so much more we could have done, but this was part of our Norway Unit and was part of our geography lessons.

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Who is Edvard Munch? What is The Scream?

I was rather surprised when we studied Norway there was nothing on Edvard Munch and The Scream, but I guess they had to miss a famous artist sometime. I’ve had such great luck with other artists, my luck had to run out sometime.

Instead, I did some YouTube searches and did some searching to see what I could find:

• Cool news story about The Scream (I found this in a completely unrelated time, and saved it for when I wrote this Edward Munch art history lesson)
• Edward Munch– his official museum
• Edward Munch beyond the Scream

And then I discovered I was spelling his name wrong, sigh, it’s EdVard Munch, not EdWard

You won’t know this because I’ve now gone in and fixed all of those misspellings, but yeah…

Pictures and text hopefully now all fixed.

Where I could have gone with this Edvard Munch Art History lesson

Like I said, there are some great parodies of this artwork, so I think an interesting lesson could be creating your own version after you study some of the parodies (I would recommend muting this video because I found the music distracting):

I’m glad they included Kevin’s Scream from Home Alone (though super-imposed with the background), because that’s what I always thought of when I saw the movie.

I think an interesting timed essay would be comparing how Edvard Munch’s work is similar to other impressionists. I would print off several different artists work, and then have them write how they are similar and different.

But, let’s talk our actual Edvard Munch Art History Lesson

I searched through several different possible videos, and then finally picked the one I thought would work best for my kids.

And then promptly forgot to save it for this post, and spent another five minutes trying to find just the right search terms to find that video again, but I DID!

Supplies needed to recreate The Scream

oil pastels, oil, paintbrush, paper

Working on our art was so hilarious as The Artist kept cringing with her brothers’ attempts to recreate The Scream and their rather primitive attempts. You can see her not so silently judging his work.

Now, there are two different methods you can use to blend the art:

I like the look when you use a bit of oil and use the paintbrush to blend the colors like we did in an earlier lesson that I forgot which one it was. I like how that looks.

I like how that blends together and how it looks, my kids apparently think this is a terrible way to do it, and so they followed the suggestion of the video and used their fingers to blend the colors in the way they wanted to.

Of course, this led to lots of, “My fingers are so dirty!” comments from the kids, and generally having fun trying to torment others as they would stick their fingers on clean surfaces.

I wasn’t super excited about that, but it was hilarious.

You know, as long as you’re not the one the dirty hands are aimed at.

More fun lessons

Whenever I’ve done a post like this, I’ve shared more art history lessons. This time I’m going to pick a bunch of random stuff that sounds fun to me.

• Serbia Unit
• Henry VIII’s wives and Six the Musical
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book club
• How to describe characters writing lesson
• How to dye fabric with natural materials

“Scream by Edward Munch” by Nickogibson is marked with CC PDM 1.0