“My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of myself and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.”

From the Munch papers in Oslo, Norway. Quoted in Edvard Munch — Behind The Scream by Sue Prideaux.

Edvard Munch wrote his confession — which could serve also as his expressionist manifesto — around the time he became fully insane at age forty-six. He had achieved fame and acquired wealth, but had practiced addictions to nicotine, strong drink and poisonous women for decades, and suffered debilitating anxieties. He committed himself to Jacobsen’s nerve clinic in Copenhagen, Denmark after waking up one day paralyzed on his left side, unable to stand on his legs or grip objects with his hands. His diagnosis: dementia paralytica, caused by alcohol poisoning with complications supplied from his lifestyle of illness and fear. The doctor sedated him so heavily in the beginning he slept eight days straight in a locked room overseen by nurses on revolving shifts. He emerged improved; his mind cleared somewhat and with effort he could walk on his own again.

By the time of his collapse Munch had created many iconic images, the most famous and most reproduced is The Scream, its subject in the foreground one androgynous human being, face twisted, hands pressed over its ears in what appears a vain attempt to block out a swirling and agitated world. Critics and art historians believe the picture encapsulates Munch’s own anxious temperament and also the anxieties of our modern age as a whole. Edvard described the revelation leading up the painting this way:

I went along the road with two friends — The sun set,

Suddenly the sky became blood — and I felt the breath of sadness.

I stopped — leaned against the fence — deathly tired,

Clouds over the fjord dripping reeking blood.

My friends went on but I just stood trembling with an open wound in my breast,

I heard a huge extraordinary scream pass through nature.

He heard that scream ripping through the natural world on high ground above Oslo, Norway.  There was a slaughterhouse close by. Next to the abattoir stood a hospital for the mentally ill, where Edvard Munch’s sister Laura had been incarcerated for some years. His biographer notes: “The screams of the animals being slaughtered in combination with the screams of the insane were reported to be a terrible thing to hear.”