The Scream

Stood in front of it for an hour. The crossed-out words pull you closer, not away — Basquiat wants you to read the whole city at once. Nothing else in the room could compete with that yellow.

Mitchell paints grief like a landscape you can walk into. Up close it's chaos; ten feet back it's a whole valley of light. Devastating and green.

You think you know it from the mug and the meme, then the real thing wrecks you. That sky isn't behind the figure — it's coming out of it.

Twombly at his most operatic. Three colours, one gesture, the size of a wall — and somehow it's the whole of Bacchus. I could hear it.