Great Regulars: But there's more than just familiarity

at work here. Gopnik adds: "The Scream may be the original and greatest of artistic one-­liners." You can "get" it from 20 yards away. You see at once that it's a ­picture of anguish so powerful that it has recon­figured the outer world into the forms and colours of the suffering inner one. Wittgenstein said that the unhappy man sees a different world from the happy man; Munch showed the full horror of that insight.

Then, having "got" it, we use it.

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: Edvard Munch the Screamer

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