Rue de Rivoli

In 1891 Edvard Munch was in Paris on a Norwegian state scholarship, absorbing everything the Impressionists and the pointillists were doing with light and broken color. He painted this view of the Rue de Rivoli from a high hotel window, and the vantage point does something strange. The street tilts sharply upward, leaving only a thin triangle of sky, and the balcony at the left rears up in blocks of purple and green that seem to hover over the drop. The traffic below dissolves into it: carriages smeared like a blurred photograph in front, a scatter of colored dots trailing into the distance. This is two years before he painted The Scream, and that same lurching, vertiginous space is already here, worked out on an ordinary busy boulevard.