Evening on Karl Johan Street _{(Edvard Munch, Expressionism)}

Munch's Evening on Karl Johan Street is a scene from a nightmare, an anxiety dream worked up into a painting. Black coated figures with corpse-white faces like Roswell aliens stream zombie-like and unstoppable towards the viewer. Munch painted this vision of Karl Johan Street, the main street of Kristiania (now Oslo), in 1892; he'd previously painted relatively realistic pictures of the street, but here it becomes the scene for an Expressionist vision of angst.

He eradicates detail; the lighted windows seem to float in space like huge rectangular kites, and the faces are featureless except for their staring eyes (and in one case a massive black bar of moustache). What in real life was a pre-theatre or after-dinner stroll has been filtered through an anguished sensibility to become a horrific zombie movie. The strong diagonal composition, with the house fronts on the left hand side of the picture crowding the evening strollers into the foreground, creates a feeling of claustrophobia.

One dark, slight figure walks away. This is often interpreted as Munch himself, turning away from a crowd whose noise and bustle is too much for the sensitive soul of an artist. He is doubled by the huge dark mass of a single tree looming on the right. Munch has created a powerful portrayal of loneliness and fear.

Munch's Other Works