The Scream, Edvard Munch – 1893
There are some images that feel like they’ve always existed, as if they emerged not from an artist’s mind but from the collective unconscious. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is one of them. You don’t look at it so much as feel it—like a shiver crawling up your spine. And part of its eerie power is that it feels both distant and utterly, uncomfortably familiar.
The scene is deceptively simple: a lone figure stands on a bridge, mouth agape in a silent howl, as the sky ignites in waves of bloody orange and red. In the background, two figures stroll, seemingly indifferent. The landscape warps and ripples, as though the very air is vibrating with dread.
Munch described the inspiration plainly: a walk at sunset, a sudden feeling “of infinite scream passing through nature.” But the genius of The Scream is not just in capturing that moment of anxiety—it’s in making it universal. The figure isn’t gendered. It isn’t named. It could be you. It could be me. It’s humanity, stripped bare and rattled by its own inner noise.
What’s so haunting isn’t that the figure is screaming—it’s that the scream is everywhere else. The sky is screaming. The fjord is screaming. Even the brushstrokes seem to twist in torment. The painting vibrates with a tension between the internal and external—what happens inside us when the world outside becomes unbearable, and vice versa.
Munch was ahead of his time. He painted what we now call anxiety, but what he knew simply as life. Long before Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, Munch understood that the most terrifying things are not monsters under the bed, but the voices we carry in our own heads.
And maybe that’s why The Scream continues to resonate. It doesn’t just depict fear—it echoes it. Not as drama, but as condition. Not as spectacle, but as confession.
In a world that asks us to smile, to perform calmness, Munch dared to put madness on canvas. And in doing so, he gave the rest of us permission to say: “Yes. I’ve felt that, too.”
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer – 1665
She turns, just slightly. Her mouth parted. Her gaze—not coy, not flirty, but somehow wide open. Vulnerable. Unfinished. And then there’s that earring. Too large to be real. Too bright to ignore. A drop of moonlight hanging from her ear.
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is often called the “Mona Lisa of the North,” but the comparison misses the point. Mona Lisa withholds. This girl, by contrast, gives you something—then instantly takes it back.
She’s been called a portrait, but she’s not one. No name, no story, no documented identity. She’s not even really a girl—she’s a moment. A fleeting flicker of intimacy that Vermeer managed to trap under paint and light.
And yet she feels specific. She feels like someone. Maybe someone you passed on the street and never forgot. Or someone you used to love, back when things were simpler, before time got in the way.
What makes her so hypnotic is not just the softness of the brushwork or the clarity of the light—it’s the psychological ambiguity. That subtle tension between being seen and being caught. She looks at us as though we’ve interrupted her. As though we matter. Or maybe she’s waiting for us to say something we never quite manage to.
There’s also the pearl itself—a mystery. Some historians even believe it’s not a pearl at all. Just a glob of tin, painted to catch light. But that’s what Vermeer does best: he takes the ordinary and convinces you it’s transcendent. He turns stillness into suspense. Silence into dialogue.
In the end, Girl with a Pearl Earring doesn’t reveal herself to you. She asks something of you. Not in words, but in presence. In that tilt of the head. In the gleam of an eye that seems to know something you don’t.
You don’t look at her. You return to her—again and again.
The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo – 1508-1512
It’s the most famous near-touch in art history.
Two hands, reaching—one with the calm assurance of a god, the other with the tentative stretch of something newly conscious. There’s less than an inch between them, and yet it feels like a chasm. A breathless gap. The entire drama of human existence, suspended in that sliver of space.
Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is so familiar that we forget how strange it really is. This is not a thunderclap moment of divine power. There are no bolts of light, no fanfare. God doesn’t touch Adam. He almost does. And that “almost” is the point.
Look closely. God is soaring forward, encased in a swirling cloak of angels, his arm outstretched like a conductor about to cue the first note. Adam lies back, passive, languid, almost bored, as if he hasn’t yet decided if he wants to be alive. His hand is limp. There’s no grip, no yearning—just a kind of reluctant curiosity.
And in that contrast—between the force of God’s intent and the apathy of Adam’s reception—we feel something essential. Creation, it turns out, is not a mechanical act. It’s a leap of trust. A risk. One that leaves room for hesitation, for incompleteness, for ambiguity.
This isn’t about power. It’s about intimacy. It’s about the vulnerability of initiating contact—of putting something of yourself into another being and hoping they’ll meet you halfway. And that’s why the hands don’t touch. Because this moment is about the tension between reaching and receiving. Between the desire to connect and the fear that connection might not be reciprocated.
Michelangelo could’ve painted anything—lightning bolts, celestial trumpets, cosmic declarations. Instead, he gave us a space no wider than a thumbnail. A pause. A question. A kind of silence. And in doing so, he made room for us.
Because we know that space. We live in it. That almost-touch is the moment before the first kiss, the moment before a child takes their first breath, the moment before you say “I love you” and don’t know if it will be said back. It’s the tightrope between intimacy and isolation. Between existence and non-existence.
The wonder of The Creation of Adam isn’t that it shows God making man. It’s that it shows God wanting to. It shows longing. Will. The act of reaching out in the first place.
And if we see ourselves in Adam—as we’re meant to—it’s worth noting that Adam, even in his stillness, responds. He does lift his hand. He does look toward God. He’s not ready. But he’s also not closed off.
That’s where the spark happens. Not in the touch, but in the decision to reach.
Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, Francis Bacon – 1968
There’s something unnerving about loving someone who is already disappearing. That’s what Francis Bacon gives us in Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror—a painting that looks less like a tribute and more like a slow, spiraling undoing.
George Dyer was Bacon’s lover, muse, and frequent subject. A small-time crook with a tragic vulnerability, Dyer appears in many of Bacon’s works not as a whole person, but as a flickering presence—fractured, exposed, reduced to twitching limbs and grimaces. But here, in this painting, something more painful happens: Dyer is shown twice. Once seated, twisting into himself. And once again, reflected in the mirror behind him. Not a duplicate, but a repetition with a difference. A delay. A disappearance in motion.
The mirror doesn’t reflect so much as it deforms. In Bacon’s world, reflection is never reassurance. It’s disintegration. It’s the way grief shows up before death has even arrived. Bacon doesn’t use mirrors for vanity—they’re portals. Psychological sinkholes. And Dyer, caught between the real and the mirrored, seems both trapped and unreachable.
What makes this painting so devastating is not just its violence—it’s the intimacy of that violence. Bacon isn’t painting a monster. He’s painting someone he loved. Someone who was slipping away not only from the canvas, but from the world. Two years after this portrait was completed, Dyer died by suicide in a Paris hotel bathroom—just hours before Bacon’s career-defining retrospective opened at the Grand Palais.
That proximity of love and loss—of success and devastation—is baked into the paint. Look at the way Dyer’s body folds in on itself. The limbs aren’t held—they’re crumpled. His face is a blur, not because Bacon couldn’t render it, but because he knew too much. He understood that sometimes the more you know a person, the harder it is to hold onto them clearly.
Even the background plays a role. The cold, clinical flatness of the wall. The stage-like quality of the room. It’s as if Dyer is being watched but never truly seen. As if the painting itself is trying, and failing, to keep him intact.
Bacon once said he didn’t want to paint the way things looked, but the way they felt. And in this portrait, feeling takes precedence over form. Grief isn’t tidy. Love isn’t symmetrical. Memory is not a mirror—it’s a funhouse of echoes and distortions.
And so we return to Dyer—not as he was, but as he haunted. As the man who gave Bacon not just a subject, but a wound. A wound he painted again and again, until paint could no longer contain it.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Édouard Manet – 1882
She stands behind the bar, arms stiff at her sides, her expression unreadable—not blank, exactly, but guarded, the way someone looks when they’ve had to answer the same question a hundred times and no longer believe the person asking really cares.
This is A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Manet’s last major work. Painted in 1882, it captures a moment of Parisian glamour, yes—but filtered through the artist’s relentless clarity. What might have been a decadent scene of nightlife and luxury becomes something else entirely: a painting about alienation, about the role of women in a world that wants them visible, but not fully seen.
Look closer. Behind the barmaid is a mirror—or at least what appears to be one. In it, the room unfolds: the chandeliers, the crowd, the acrobat’s legs dangling from above. And then, that man. His face obscured, he leans in toward her reflection, possibly speaking, possibly soliciting, while she—the real her—remains still, distant, untouched.
The mirror should clarify. Instead, it confuses. The physics are wrong. The reflection doesn’t line up with where she’s standing. The viewer is displaced, left uncertain of where they’re meant to be—an intentional unease that mirrors her own.
Manet, ever the provocateur, was painting not just a place but a position. The woman at the bar is a vendor, a spectacle, and maybe—by implication—a sex worker. She’s not part of the party; she’s the cost of it. You can have champagne and oranges, sure, but only if you can also ignore the human being sliding them across the counter.
There’s a cruel irony in how luminous the painting is. The colors are rich. The surfaces gleam. But at the center of all that light is a woman lit up like an exhibit—emotionally opaque and utterly alone.
And that’s the heartbreak. Because we’ve all had that look. The one that says: I’m here, but not really. I’m performing being present, because that’s what’s expected of me. But inside, I’ve gone somewhere else.
In that way, Manet isn’t just painting the Folies-Bergère. He’s painting every fluorescent-lit job, every forced smile, every moment you’ve had to stand still and absorb the demands of the world without letting it bruise the surface.
It’s not a portrait of a barmaid. It’s a mirror of us.
