The Mad Genius (PIMN)

Your sense of beauty

A love aching enough to tear at the chest, an anxiety swirling at the bottom of the night — you never try to hide any of it. More than a work that is merely harmonious and pretty, you are shaken in the soul by expression where the maker's raw suffering and something close to a frenzied passion have been hurled out dynamically. Meeting expression that breaks through conventional rules and polite practice to expose the turbid truth inside a human being, you feel the blood rise through your whole body. However the world may condemn it as unclean or heretical, you feel that the flame of life burns in work where the cry of the soul has been laid into sound and color exactly as it was.

What moves you

The instant you meet a composition under a sky dyed crimson, wrapped in a surging blood-colored palette, hands over the ears. Or hearing an orchestra thrash violently and drag you into a world of frenzied fantasy.

The beauty you tend to overlook

A quiet, peaceful world of order that shows no disturbance of feeling at all. Step one pace out of the whirl of fierce emotion and give yourself to a form lined up without waste, and you can taste a calm sensation of a wounded heart quietly settling.

The composer in tune with you: Hector Berlioz

Berlioz produced the Symphonie fantastique out of a violent feeling for the actress Smithson, whom he saw on stage in 1827. Its unprecedented orchestration and programmatic character split the judgment of his contemporaries sharply. The melody representing her returns in changed shapes while an enormous orchestra strikes out a frenzied sound — music that resonates deeply with a sense of beauty that turns the pain of living into fierce expression.

The painter who resonates with you: Edvard Munch

Munch drew The Scream out of the collapse of love and hatred and the memory of illness. His works were attacked at the time as unfinished and crude, and at his 1895 solo exhibition a public debate was even held over the painter's sanity. In the picture, a blood-red evening sky and a coastal landscape surge violently while the figure at the center twists its face and covers its ears. A surface that cuts inner anxiety and outcry into the canvas in fierce color resonates strongly with your sensibility.

What links the two

There is no historical connection between the two. But they share a quality: lifting personal love and hatred and the trauma of collapse into expression fierce enough to shatter the traditional frame.

Three paintings for you

The Scream

Edvard Munch

Madonna

Edvard Munch