Through his own words as well as his works and techniques...

Through his own words as well as his works and techniques, his overbearing anxiety shines forth, pulling him away from fallenness and “putting him into direct contact with nothingness” (Harman, 107). Anxiety (1894), often referred to as “Angst,” evidently shares the red-and-yellow threatening sky of The Scream (1893). The blood-red sky vibrates with the soul of the uncanny, filling us with an air of anxiety even before we look at the figures in the foreground.

Munch painted “mask-like numbed faces and eyes wide open with terror, as if driven by an invisible power and without a will of their own” (Xani, 48); the cropped, “groundless” figures appear to be at “the mercy of external forces,” being driven to follow a certain, unknown, and possibly discarded, path (Crockett, 63), highlighted by the demonic sky.

The figures are staring at the viewers in a rather provoking manner as they walk towards the “unknown,” possibly the pace of their death, and this movement emphasizes the temporality of Dasein, according to Heidegger (Sheehan, 10). They are moving towards both - the “all-knowing” and the “un-knowing” - faces of death (Kroug, 400), filling them with all-powerful anxiety.

Other than the strong coloring used by Munch for his sky, the yellow tones used for the faces of his figures is also salient and clearly symbolizes a loss of vitality and sense of corruption (Harris, 4). As the eye travels from the foreground to the background, the faces gradually start losing their features as they flow backwards into the horizon.

Staying partly hidden, however, the figures stand out, being concealed, in other words, in not “showing it all.” The now-anxious spectator is forced to think, knowing that only a part of the whole is being presented, and this once again raises the level of anxiety. One could also wonder: Who are these figures? Are they each an authentic Dasein, or - since they seem to be following each other rather blindly - are they in fact Das Man?

Is the artist trying to punish the masses, which possibly rejected him by casting a “spell of anxiety” upon them? The latter interpretation appears to be true, mainly due to the gradual deletion of facial features from many of his street figures, making them anonymous - a simple “crowd” - thus Das Man. In 1893 Munch painted his most iconic work to date, The Scream , sometimes referred to as The Cry .