Art & Creativity Quote by Edvard Munch

A clean, bourgeois room is exactly what Munch is declaring war on: the safe genre scene where men think and women stitch, everyone quietly performing the social order. “Interiors” here aren’t just walls and furniture; they’re a whole cultural ideology of containment. The line is a rejection of painting as polite documentation and a pivot toward art as exposure - of nerves, desire, dread, loneliness, and the messy weather of being alive.

The specific intent is practical and aesthetic: Munch wants out of the Scandinavian naturalist tradition that prized decorum, legibility, and respectable subject matter. He’s aiming for figures that don’t merely pose but register sensation. “Breathe and feel and suffer and love” reads like a manifesto for expressionism before the label hardens: paint not what the eye sees, but what the psyche can’t unsee. He’s also refusing the gendered script embedded in those interiors. The “men reading/women knitting” pairing is a miniature of a society that assigns intellect to one body and domestic labor to another, then calls the arrangement peaceful.

Context sharpens the stakes. Munch is working in a Europe increasingly fascinated by psychology and haunted by modernity’s dislocations; his own biography (illness, death, anxiety) makes “suffer” sound less like romantic posturing than lived fact. The subtext is that traditional realism can be another form of anesthesia. If painting is going to matter, it has to risk ugliness, intensity, and moral discomfort - the price of depicting “living people” instead of socially acceptable types.