Anxiety

Anxiety (Angst) is an 1894 painting by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. The canvas, 94 by 73 centimeters, is in the Munch Museum (MUNCH) in Oslo. It shares its setting, a road high above the Oslofjord under a burning sky, with Munch's most famous image, The Scream, painted the year before.

What you are looking at

A procession of people walks straight toward us, filling the lower half of the canvas. In front is a young woman in a black dress with a red scarf or hat, her face greenish-white, eyes wide and fixed. Behind her come men in black coats and top hats, their faces gaunt masks with hollow eyes, and further back still a crowd of indistinct heads under hats, drawn as little more than dark shapes and pale smudges.

Behind them, the landscape twists. The dark blue water of the fjord curls in from the right, with a small boat and the far shore, and above it the sky is a band of swirling red, orange and yellow streaked with green-blue, painted in long, undulating strokes. Nobody looks at anything; nobody speaks. They simply advance, together and utterly alone.

How it was painted

Munch paints thinly and quickly, with large areas of flat, unmixed color and wavy contour lines that tie figures and landscape into a single rhythm. The faces are simplified almost to caricature, closer to masks than portraits. The clash of hot sky and cold, dark figures produces the unease the title names.

Anxiety and The Scream

Munch thought of his major paintings of the 1890s as a cycle, which he later called The Frieze of Life, on love, anxiety and death. Anxiety belongs to its darker section. Where The Scream isolates one figure in terror, Anxiety turns the feeling into a social condition: a crowd of bourgeois citizens, dressed for an evening walk, all carrying the same silent dread. The figures echo his earlier street scene Evening on Karl Johan (1892). Munch also made a lithograph and a woodcut of the composition in 1896.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Munch Museum, which moved to its new building on Oslo's waterfront in 2021. Related works include Melancholy, Vampire (Love and Pain) and Starry Night. See also Edvard Munch and the Symbolism collection.