Study Gallery 08: Screen 9

PASSION AND ANXIETY

What do feelings look like? In several of his works, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch has portrayed intense emotional states, such as passion and anxiety, through pictures of sick people and loving couples.

The girl is sitting naked on the side of her bed. The title tells us she is unwell. How does Munch’s painting convey this? Throughout the ages, artists have used symbols to suggest more than we see in the motif at first glance. In many of Munch’s works, colours are used to convey the mood. Language can describe abstract feelings by comparing them to colour. We can be green with envy, red with rage or white as a corpse. The girl’s body is pale with highlighted area, but her cheeks are unhealthily red. This tells us what illness she is suffering from.

The style itself can also communicate strong moods and emotions, an aspect utilised by the German expressionist painters. Munch’s way of portraying feelings through lines and postures is particularly obvious in his prints. Look at the man sitting with his head in his hand. The blue sky billows unsteadily above him. The title of the work refers to melancholia. According to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), this form of gloom was a grief that stemmed from indignation and disappointment. Munch himself suffered many disappointments in love, and several of his works are characterised by passion and anxiety.