Anxiety

Munch painted Anxiety in 1894, and if it looks familiar that is because he built it out of two of his own earlier pictures. The blood-red sky and the wooden jetty over the fjord are lifted straight from The Scream, painted the year before, while the crowd of pale, staring faces coming toward you is borrowed from an earlier scene of an evening on Oslo's main street. He was working in Berlin at the time, part of a circle of writers and artists preoccupied with dread and the inner life, and he gathered these images into a cycle he called the Frieze of Life. Here the single screaming figure of the earlier work has multiplied into a whole procession, each face locked in the same fixed fear. Two years later he cut the same motif into wood and stone as prints.