Golgotha

A crucified Christ rises at the center while below a crowd of grotesque, leering, staring faces presses forward, hemming him in. Munch painted Golgotha while undergoing treatment in a clinic, and the picture reads as a deeply personal vision - the artist identifying with the persecuted figure surrounded by a hostile mob. Now in the Munch Museum in Oslo, it fuses religious subject with raw psychological projection, the biblical scene becoming an image of his own sense of suffering and exposure, the sacred drama recast as private torment under the gaze of a jeering throng.