The frieze of life: When edvard munch painted the soul in crisis
Imagine an autumn evening in Oslo, 1892. The sky takes on a reddish hue, almost bloody, as if nature itself were holding its breath. A man walks along a fjord, his hands pressed to his temples. Suddenly, he stops, seized by a vision: a ghostly silhouette, mouth wide open in a silent scream, while the horizon twists into warped waves. That evening, Edvard Munch did not paint a landscape. He captured the echo of an anguish that spans centuries, a fear so universal it would become the icon of modernity: The Scream.
By Artedusa
••12 min readBut The Scream is only one piece of a much larger puzzle, a monumental frieze in which Munch attempted to grasp the very essence of human existence: The Frieze of Life. For nearly twenty-five years, the Norwegian artist worked on this series of canvases—a poetic and tormented cycle exploring love, jealousy, illness, and death. More than a mere collection of works, The Frieze is a sensory and metaphysical experience, a mirror held up to our most intimate fears. And if these paintings still haunt us today, it is because they do not speak only of Munch. They speak of us.
The scream that crossed Europe
Berlin, 1892. The city is abuzz. Cafés hum with discussions of Nietzsche, Freud, and the latest theories on the unconscious. It is in this electric climate that Edvard Munch, then 29 years old, exhibits a series of paintings for the first time under the title Study for a Series: Love. The public is scandalized. Critics call it "degenerate art," the "delirium of a madman." One visitor faints before Madonna, where a woman with both sacred and sensual features seems to float in an aura of desire and mystery. Another shouts that The Scream is "an insult to beauty."
Yet, in the shadows of the exhibition halls, a few visionary minds immediately recognize the power of these works. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg, himself obsessed with the abysses of the human soul, writes to Munch: "You have painted what no one dared to see: the reverse side of the scenery, the fear that gnaws at us from within." What shocks then is not so much the technique—though the acidic colors and distorted forms break with academicism—but the frankness with which Munch exposes his demons. The Frieze of Life is not decoration. It is a confession.
And this confession arrives at a pivotal moment. Europe, on the cusp of the 20th century, is in the throes of an existential crisis. Religious certainties are crumbling, cities are growing too fast, and science reveals a universe far colder and more indifferent than humanity had imagined. Munch, for his part, does not theorize. He paints. And in his canvases, the viewer recognizes their own torments: the anguish of solitude, the fear of madness, the eternal vertigo before the unknown.
A frieze for eternity: when art becomes ritual
To understand The Frieze of Life, one must forget the sterile museums where these paintings now hang. One must imagine Munch in his studio in Ekely, near Oslo, surrounded by unfinished canvases, pots of dried paint, and hastily scribbled sketches. For him, The Frieze is not a series of paintings but a total work, a kind of modern Divine Comedy where each canvas is a canto, a stage in an initiatory journey.
The idea comes to him in 1893, after a stay in Paris where he discovers medieval frescoes and the narrative cycles of the Renaissance. But where Giotto painted biblical scenes with solemn serenity, Munch chooses to depict the torments of the contemporary soul. "I want to paint life as it is lived, not as it is shown," he writes in his journal. And to do so, he invents a new visual grammar: colors that bleed, perspectives that slip away, faces that seem to dissolve into the canvas.
Take The Dance of Life (1899–1900), one of the masterpieces of the series. In the foreground, three women dance on a moonlit beach. The one on the left, dressed in white, embodies purity and innocence. The one in the center, in red, symbolizes passion and seduction. To the right, a woman in black weeps, already consumed by regret. Between them, a man in dark clothing observes the scene, like a powerless spectator. The painting is an allegory of time passing, but also a meditation on female duality—the Madonna and the whore, life and death, united in the same tragic waltz.
What strikes in The Frieze is this impression of perpetual motion. The characters always seem on the verge of spilling out of the frame, as if the canvas itself were an unstable space. Munch uses aggressive diagonals, blurred contours, clashing colors to create a nearly physical tension. "Painting must be like an open wound," he said. And that is exactly what he did: he opened a window onto the invisible, where emotions become tangible.
The colors of anguish: when painting becomes fever
If The Frieze of Life marks a turning point in art history, it is also because Munch revolutionized the use of color. Forget the harmonious landscapes of the Impressionists or the polished portraits of the academicians. Here, hues do not describe the world. They distort it, violate it, until it reveals its rawest truth.
Look at Anxiety (1894), one of the most disturbing paintings in the series. A crowd of pale faces advances toward the viewer, like an army of ghosts. Their eyes are empty, their mouths slightly open in a grimace of terror. The sky, a sickly yellow-green, seems to rot on the spot. Munch did not choose these colors by chance. Yellow, often associated with illness, evokes here an atmosphere of fever, of delirium. Green, the color of decomposition, reinforces the idea of a humanity in decay. As for the red of the lips and cheeks, it recalls blood, but also the passion that consumes from within.
This palette is not merely expressive. It is symbolic. In Madonna (1894–1895), the female figure is enveloped in a reddish aura, as if she radiated a heat both sacred and sensual. Under a microscope, one discovers that the halo contains sperm-like motifs—a deliberate provocation, a blend of the divine and the carnal that shocked the puritans of the time. "Love and death are two sides of the same coin," Munch wrote. And in his paintings, these two forces clash endlessly, in a struggle of which the viewer becomes an unwilling witness.
But it is perhaps in The Scream that this alchemy of colors reaches its peak. The sky, an orange-red, seems ablaze. The blues and greens of the fjord below mingle in a churning sea. And at the center, that skeletal silhouette, its face reduced to a gaping mouth and two empty eye sockets. "I felt a great scream in nature," Munch noted in his journal. That scream, he translated into colors—colors that shriek, that bleed, that pierce us like a blade.
The shattered mirror: Munch and his doubles
Behind every painting in The Frieze of Life lies a part of Munch himself. The artist never sought to hide. On the contrary, he turned his paintings into an autobiography in images, an intimate diary where each character is a fragment of his soul.
Take Death in the Sickroom (1893). The scene depicts Munch’s family keeping vigil over his sister Sophie, taken by tles grandes plateformes numériquesculosis at the age of 15. The artist, then 14, is the only one looking at the viewer. His face is a mask of pain, as if he were making us witness his helplessness. "Illness, madness, and death were the black angels that watched over my cradle," he would later write. And in The Frieze, these angels return endlessly, in the form of fatal women, laughing skeletons, or distorted landscapes.
But Munch does not merely paint his traumas. He transforms them, distorts them, until they become universal archetypes. In Vampire (1893–1895), a red-haired woman clutches a man in an embrace that is both sensual and deadly. Who is this woman? A lover? A possessive mother? Death itself? Munch offers no answer. He prefers to let doubt linger, as in those nightmares where one no longer knows whether one is fleeing a monster or running toward it.
This ambiguity lies at the heart of The Frieze. The characters are both real and symbolic, near and distant. In Jealousy (1895), a man watches, powerless, as his mistress kisses another. His face is distorted by suffering, but also by something more primal—a rage bordering on madness. "Jealousy is a beast that devours the soul," Munch said. And in this painting, the beast is there, lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce.
The curse of museums: when masterpieces become prey
The Scream has been stolen twice. The first time, in 1994, while it was on display at the National Gallery in Oslo. The thieves, two masked men, took it down in broad daylight, under the stunned eyes of visitors. They left a note on the frame: "Thanks for the poor security." The second time, in 2004, was even more dramatic. Two armed men burst into the Munch Museum, threatened the guards, and made off with The Scream and a version of Madonna. The paintings, recovered two years later, bore the scars of their odyssey: fingerprints, scratches, and humidity that had warped the canvas.
These thefts are not mere anecdotes. They reveal something deeper: the magnetic power of these works. The Scream is not just a painting. It is a symbol, an icon, an object of fascination and desire. And like all great works, it carries within it a curse—that of never truly belonging to those who possess it.
Munch himself was aware of this. In the 1910s, as he worked on the final versions of The Frieze, he wrote: "These paintings are my children. I bore them in pain, and I do not want them to end up in bourgeois salons." Yet that is exactly what happened. After his death in 1944, his works were scattered across museums around the world, where they became objects of contemplation—and sometimes speculation.
Today, The Scream is insured for over $100 million. Madonna sold at auction for £11.5 million in 2012. But behind these figures lies a troubling question: can one truly possess a work that speaks of the impossibility of possessing anything? Munch, for his part, chose to bequeath the majority of his paintings to the city of Oslo. "I do not want my art to be locked away in safes," he said. Ironically, that is where it ended up—protected, watched over, yet always as elusive as ever.
The legacy of a scream: why Munch still haunts us
More than a century after its creation, The Frieze of Life continues to fascinate. Exhibitions are dedicated to it every year, books analyze its smallest details, and The Scream is reproduced on mugs, t-shirts, and horror movie posters. But beyond its status as a pop icon, this series asks an essential question: why do these paintings, which speak of madness, death, and despair, still move us?
Perhaps because they do not lie. In a world where social media pushes us to display perfect lives, where algorithms trap us in bubbles of artificial happiness, Munch reminds us that anguish is part of the human condition. His paintings do not seek to comfort us. They confront us with our fears, like a mirror that reflects not our appearance but our soul.
Look at Anxiety (1894). That crowd of pale faces advancing toward us—is it a metaphor for modern society? A premonition of the anonymous crowds of big cities? Or simply the echo of our own anxieties, amplified by isolation and uncertainty? Munch does not provide an answer. He merely asks the question—and that, perhaps, is what makes him a timeless artist.
Today, as the world seems increasingly unstable, The Frieze of Life resonates with new urgency. Climate crises, pandemics, wars—all these collective fears find an echo in Munch’s paintings. "Art must be like a fever that burns within us," he said. And indeed, when one looks at The Scream, one feels that this fever has never gone out.
Epilogue: what if beauty lay in the wound?
There is one last painting in The Frieze that must be mentioned: The Sun (1911). After years of painting darkness, Munch finally depicts light—a flaming disk radiating over a deserted beach. Some see in it a note of hope, a redemption after the shadows. Others, a mere pause before the anguish returns, stronger than ever.
For that is what The Frieze of Life is: a work that does not end. An unfinished frieze, like life itself. Munch knew he would never capture the essence of existence. So he did what all great artists do: he turned his failure into beauty.
And that, perhaps, is the greatest mystery of these paintings. They do not offer answers. They hold up a mirror—and in that mirror, we see our own wounds, our own stifled screams. But also, somewhere, a strange form of comfort. For if Munch could paint his pain, then perhaps we, too, can find the strength to face it.
So the next time you encounter The Scream in a museum, do not just photograph it. Come closer. Look at it truly. And listen. Perhaps you will hear, beyond the silence, the echo of a scream that is also your own.