Munch described the experience which inspired his most famous painting The Scream: ‘I was walking along a road one evening… The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming… I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colours screamed. In a later painting he drew heavily on the compositional elements in The Scream to express Anxiety. An observation about Munch by his friend, the poet Sigbjorn Obstfelder, is quoted by John Gage: ‘He feels colours and he reveals his feelings through colours; he does not see them in isolation. He does not just see yellow, red and blue and violet; he sees sorrow and screaming and melancholy and decay.’
Van Gogh wrote passionately about his ideas. He regarded colour as one of the keys: ‘instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly.’. In letters to his brother he describes his intentions for his painting The Night Café: ‘I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green’. And then: ‘In my picture of the Night Café, I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime.’. In a letter to fellow painter émile Bernard, written from the asylum in St Rémy, van Gogh links a particular colour combination specifically to a particular emotional state: ‘this combination of red ochre, of green gloomed over by gray, the black streaks surrounding the contours, produces something of the sensation of anguish, called ‘noir-rouge’ (black-red), from which certain of my companions in misfortune frequently suffer.’
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