Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter famous for his Scream painting. After it’s success, he painted  Anxiety, another portrait of his mental illness. Munch was born on December 12th, 1863. Like many great artists, Munch’s childhood was filled with illness. While he was bed ridden, he took up art as a passion and soon it became his career. When he was young his mother and sister died of tuberculosis, leaving only him, his brothers and his religiously obsessed father.

Munch wrote about his father, citing his father’s fanaticism as the source of his madness. “The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born”. In the late 1800s, Munch took up the bohemian lifestyle in Berlin, where his peers urged him to express his inner turmoil and mental challenges through painting.

In 1897 Munch painted Anxiety, where his lifelong neuroticism was embodied in the paint strokes. Alienating faces stare the audience down, with a macabre abnormality. They are undeniably human, but are struck in judgement and fear. It’s as if they are scolding the onlooker. The crowd is unending, all locked onto the onlooker.

The feeling of anxiety brought about others judgement is part of the human experience. Munch taps into this feeling with this piece. The multitude of the subjects displays the feeling that everyone is judging you. Different shapes, sizes, genders, temperaments, etc. Everyone is scorning you.

Edvard Munch would later have a mental breakdown, pushing him into alcoholism. Many thinkers hypothesize he had Borderline Personality Disorder. He was able to funnel his inner world onto the canvas, relating to the audience through his paintings.

Image Credits:

Featured Image: Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

Body Image: Edvard Munch