Munch’s The Scream is an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time. As Leonardo da Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and self-control, Munch defined how we see our own age—wracked with anxiety and uncertainty. 
His painting of a sexless, twisted, fetal-faced creature, with mouth and eyes open wide in a shriek of horror, re-created a vision that had seized him as he walked one evening in his youth with two friends at sunset. As he later described it, the “air turned to blood” and the “faces of my comrades became a garish yellow-white.” Vibrating in his ears he heard “a huge endless scream course through nature.” By using vivid contrast of red, yellow, blue and black, it seems that it is the colors who is screaming. I like this painting most out of Munch’s work because I think its power not only resides in the visual sense, but also in the acoustic sense. It wakes views’ whole body to taste it.
2. 
In 2010, Shanghai will hold the World Expo, while in 1937, the Spanish rulers commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a big mural for the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition (the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris). The Guernica bombing inspired Picasso. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering war inflicts upon individuals. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. Within fifteen days of the attack, Pablo Picasso began painting this mural. This tour brought the Spanish civil war to the world’s attention.
Guernica presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness without portraying their immediate causes. The choice to paint in black and white conveys the chronological nearness of a newspaper photograph and the lifelessness war affords. Guernica depicts suffering people, animals, and buildings wrenched by violence and chaos.
The overall scene is within a room where, at an open end on the left, a wide-eyed bull stands over a woman grieving over a dead child in her arms.
The centre is occupied by a horse falling in agony as it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. The shape of a human skull forms the horse’s nose and upper teeth.
Two “hidden” images formed by the horse appear in Guernica (illustrated to the right):
A human skull overlays the horse’s body.
A bull appears to gore the horse from underneath. The bull’s head is formed mainly by the horse’s entire front leg which has the knee on the ground. The leg’s knee cap forms the head’s nose. A horn appears within the horse’s breast.
The bulls tail forms the image of a flame with smoke rising from it, seemingly appearing in a window created by the lighter shade of gray surrounding it.
Under the horse is a dead, apparently dismembered soldier, his hand on a severed arm still grasps a shattered sword from which a flower grows.
A light bulb blazes in the shape of an eye over the suffering horse’s head (the bare bulb of the torturer’s cell.)
To the upper right of the horse, a frightened female figure, who seems to be witnessing the scenes before her, appears to have floated into the room through a window. Her arm, also floating in, carries a flame-lit lamp.
From the right, an awe-struck woman staggers towards the center below the floating female figure. She looks up blankly into the blazing light bulb.
Daggers that suggest screaming replace the tongues of the bull, grieving woman, and horse.
A bird, possibly a dove, stands on a shelf behind the bull in panic.
On the far right, a figure with arms raised in terror is entrapped by fire from above and below.
A dark wall with an open door defines the right end of the mural.
There are stigmata (the supposed marks on the hands of those who have “suffered as Jesus”) on the hands of the dead soldier. Picasso was not religious, although he was brought up in the predominantly Catholic Spain, and these symbols are not to be interpreted as Christian identification This, instead, reflects the idea that all of us suffer often without cause. Here Picasso is using a well recognisable image to demonstrate how we are all like Christ, in that we all suffer and eventually die.
Thus, this monumental work has eclipsed the bounds of a single time and place, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace.
3. 
D’oǜ venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Oǜ allons-nous? (Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?) is an oil painting on canvas created by Paul Gauguin in 1897.
This is Gauguin’s ultimate masterpiece – if all the Gauguins in the world, except one, were to be evaporated (perish the thought!), this would be the one to preserve. He claimed that he did not think of the long title until the work was finished, but he is known to have been creative with the truth. The picture is so superbly organized into three “scoops” – a circle to right and to left, and a great oval in the center – that I cannot but believe he had his questions in mind from the start. I am often tempted to forget that these are questions, and to think that he is suggesting answers, but there are no answers here; there are three fundamental questions, posed visually.
On the right (Where do we come from?), we see the baby, and three young women – those who are closest to that eternal mystery. In the center, Gauguin meditates on what we are. Here are two women, talking about destiny (or so he described them), a man looking puzzled and half-aggressive, and in the middle, a youth plucking the fruit of experience. This has nothing to do, I feel sure, with the Garden of Eden; it is humanity’s innocent and natural desire to live and to search for more life. A child eats the fruit, overlooked by the remote presence of an idol – emblem of our need for the spiritual. There are women (one mysteriously curled up into a shell), and there are animals with whom we share the world: a goat, a cat, and kittens. In the final section (Where are we going?), a beautiful young woman broods, and an old woman prepares to die. Her pallor and gray hair tell us so, but the message is underscored by the presence of a strange white bird. I once described it as “a mutated puffin,” and I do not think I can do better. It is Gauguin’s symbol of the afterlife, of the unknown (just as the dog, on the far right, is his symbol of himself).
All this is set in a paradise of tropical beauty: the Tahiti of sunlight, freedom, and color that Gauguin left everything to find. A little river runs through the woods, and behind it is a great slash of brilliant blue sea, with the misty mountains of another island rising beyond Gauguin wanted to make it absolutely clear that this picture was his testament. He seems to have concocted a story that, being ill and unappreciated (that part was true enough), he determined on suicide – the great refusal. He wrote to a friend, describing his journey into the mountains with arsenic. Then he found himself still alive, and returned to paint more masterworks. It is sad that so great an artist felt he needed to manufacture a ploy to get people to appreciate his work. I wish he could see us now, looking with awe at this supreme painting.
It is a very powerful masterpiece. It represents the history of human being and the heart-serenity people want to obtain in the modern, materialized society.
Paintings can not speak, but they use their own way teaching us to speak, speak for them, speak for our own.
