Edvard Munch – Anxiety

Anxiety

Anxiety by Edvard Munch is a painting of 1894, held under inventory number MM.M.00515 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original is oil on canvas and measures 73 x 94 cm. A crowd of people comes straight out of the picture toward the viewer, and above them the sky burns in bands of red and orange.

The sky fills the upper third in horizontal ribbons of scarlet, orange and yellow, with turquoise and blue-green strands drawn through them. Below the horizon the fjord lies in violet-blue bands that curve one behind another toward the shore, a red-orange reflection snakes across the water, and small dark hulls sit on it. At the right of the bay a dark shoreline with masts is indicated. In the foreground a group of figures stands pressed together. The faces are pale yellow-green and mask-like, the eyes dark and wide open. Left of centre a man wears a tall black top hat, a white triangle of shirt-front showing beneath his chin. Behind him five or six further heads recede in a line, some in hats. At the right a woman wears a coral-pink bonnet framing her greenish face, with a pale pink collar opening below it. The bodies merge at the bottom into a single black mass, and no ground is visible at all.

The painting belongs to the Frieze of Life, the cycle Munch worked on for more than two decades. The scene brings together two things he had developed separately: the crowd of townspeople advancing on the viewer in Evening on Karl Johan, and the burning sky over the fjord known from The Scream of the year before. The place is the same, the road above the town looking out over the water. Anxiety is therefore not a repetition of either painting but the meeting of the two.

Munch laid the colour on thinly and in long, traceable strokes; in several places the weave of the canvas shows through, which gives the sky a dry, almost fibrous look. The faces are built from a few strokes with almost no drawing, and the contours are picked out here and there with a dark blue line.

Ours is among the reproductions of famous paintings that we paint by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, and never print. Because a painter makes each one for the individual order, no two canvases match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw.

Its horizontal build and strong sky make it work well above a longer piece of furniture – a sideboard, a low cabinet or a sofa – where the bands of the sky have room to run. As wall decor it wants a calm surface in white, grey or warm sand, with some empty space left at either side, or the crowd of faces starts to feel hemmed in. Warm artificial light suits it in the evening, while direct sun breaks up the reds. It sits naturally beside The Scream, since the two were made in the same place and the same years.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.