Anxiety
A crowd of hollow-faced figures on the Ekeberg road above the Oslofjord, under a blood-red sky — the same hillside as The Scream.
Oslofjord
The painting depicts a real landscape or cityscape. The precise viewpoint the artist used may be unknown, so the marker shows the general area.
Anxiety — at a glance
- Artist
- Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
- Year
- 1894
- Movement
- Symbolism / proto-Expressionism
- Place
- The Ekeberg road above the Oslofjord, Oslo, Norway
- Viewpoint
- The hillside of The Scream — road line and fjord view survive (now Ekebergparken); city changed
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- c. 94 × 74 cm
- Now at
- Munch Museum (MUNCH), Oslo
Overview
Anxiety is a painting by Edvard Munch of 1894, part of his cycle ‘The Frieze of Life’. A close mass of dark-clad figures with pale, staring, mask-like faces stands on a sloping road, coming straight towards the viewer, beneath a sky striped in violent orange and red. It is oil on canvas, about 94 by 74 cm, and it hangs in the Munch Museum (MUNCH), Oslo.
It fuses two earlier pictures: the advancing crowd of ‘Evening on Karl Johan’ and the flaming sky, curving rail and water of ‘The Scream’.
Where was Anxiety painted?
Scholarship The setting is the same as ‘The Scream’: the road that runs along the wooded hillside of Ekeberg on the south-east edge of Kristiania (now Oslo), high above the city and the Oslofjord, with a wooden railing along the drop and a view over the water to the far shore and the hills. Munch walked this road often. Ekeberg is now a public park (Ekebergparken) with marked viewpoints; the hillside, the fjord view and the line of the old road survive, though the city below has completely changed. The picture uses that real place as a stage for an inner state rather than as a topographic view.
What is in the painting?
The figures fill the lower two-thirds of the canvas and press forward: black coats and hats, a woman in front in dark clothes, every face a flat pale oval with dark eye-sockets and a fixed stare. Behind them the railing and the road curve away to the left; beyond, the blue-black fjord with two small boats, low hills, and a sky laid in long horizontal bands of orange, yellow and red.
Look closely
The mask-like faces
Every face is a flat pale oval with dark eye-sockets and a fixed stare, barely told apart.
The wooden railing
The rail of ‘The Scream’ runs along the drop and curves the road away to the left.
The striped sky
Long horizontal bands of orange, yellow and red — the sky of ‘The Scream’.
The fjord and boats
The blue-black Oslofjord with two tiny boats lies far below the road.
Analysis
Composition and technique
A wall of faces advancing out of the frame, set against the diagonal rail and the burning horizontal sky of The Scream.
Scholarship Munch combines the two devices that unsettle the viewer most: a crowd with no ground to stand on bearing down frontally, and the plunging perspective of the railed road with its lurid sky. The paint is thin, dragged and nervous; the faces are barely individualised.
Meaning and interpretation
Interpretations differ. What the artist documented, what museums and scholars propose, and later or speculative theories are marked and kept separate.
Collective dread
Where ‘The Scream’ isolates one figure in terror, ‘Anxiety’ spreads the same feeling through a crowd: the respectable townspeople of Kristiania become a procession of the fearful and dead-eyed. It is read as an image of shared modern anxiety and of the loss of the individual in the mass.
Part of the Frieze of Life
Munch grouped it with ‘The Scream’, ‘Evening on Karl Johan’ and other works in his lifelong cycle staging love, fear and death against the real streets and shores of Kristiania.
History & provenance
The painting is in the Munch Museum (MUNCH) in Oslo, which holds the artist's own bequest of the bulk of his work to the city.
Sources
- Munch Museum (MUNCH), Oslo — collection entry for Edvard Munch, ‘Anxiety’ (‘Angst’, 1894; oil on canvas, c. 94 × 74 cm)
- Ekebergparken, Oslo — the Ekeberg hillside and the viewpoints associated with Munch
Frequently asked
Where is Anxiety set?
On the road along Ekeberg hill on the south-east edge of Oslo (then Kristiania), high above the city and the Oslofjord — the same hillside and view as ‘The Scream’.
Can you go there?
Yes. Ekeberg is now a public sculpture park, Ekebergparken, with marked viewpoints. The hillside, the fjord view and the line of the old road survive, though the city below has entirely changed.
How is it related to The Scream?
It reuses the setting, the railed curving road and the flaming striped sky of ‘The Scream’, but replaces the single screaming figure with an advancing crowd of pale, staring faces.
What do the faces mean?
Munch turns the fashionable townspeople into a procession of the fearful and hollow-eyed — an image of shared, modern dread and of the individual lost in the crowd.
Where is the painting now?
In the Munch Museum (MUNCH), Oslo.
Related paintings
More by Edvard Munch
