Edvard Munch nature." He later described the personal anguish behind the painting, "for several years I was almost mad… You know my picture, 'The Scream?' I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again." In summing up the painting's effects, author Martha Tedeschi has stated: "Whistler's Mother", Wood's "American Gothic", Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" and Edvard Munch's "The Scream" have all achieved something that most paintings—regardless of their art historical importance, beauty, or monetary value—have not: they communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to almost every
Painting the Century: 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900–2000 Sargent, Egon Schiele, Walter Sickert, Marty St. James. The subjects included Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Charlie Chaplin by Fernand Léger, Edith Sitwell by Pavel Tchelitchew, Leigh Bowery by Lucian Freud, David Bowie and Iman by Stephen Finer, Vladimir Lenin by Isaak Brodsky, a self-portrait by Edvard Munch, Somerset Maugham by Graham Sutherland, Elvis Presley by Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol by Jean-Michel Basquiat, "Boy/Girl – the artists children" by Marty St. James. Painting the Century: 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900–2000 Painting the Century: 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900–2000 was an international exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2000–2001