Near the top left corner of the 1893 version of The Scream, someone once penciled a sentence in Norwegian: Can only have been painted by a madman! For decades, curators assumed it was an insult from a vandal. In 2021, researchers at Norway's National Museum announced that the handwriting matched Edvard Munch's own. He had written it himself, probably after hearing the criticism, and kept it as a joke on his critics.
The scene is a real place. Munch described walking at sunset on a road overlooking Oslo's fjord, when the sky turned blood red and he felt an infinite scream passing through nature. In the picture, the figure is not actually screaming. Hands pressed to the head, it is covering its ears against a scream that comes from the landscape. Munch's title for it was The Scream of Nature.
Some people have suggested a real explanation for the sky. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa threw ash into the atmosphere and produced vivid red sunsets over Europe for months. It is only a theory, but it fits the date. Munch also carried a lot of grief: his mother and sister died when he was a child, and another sister spent her life in a psychiatric hospital. He once wrote that sickness and madness were the black angels on his cradle.
He made several versions, a painting in tempera and crayon on cardboard in 1893, a crayon version the same year, a pastel in 1895, a second painting in 1910, and a lithograph. The pastel sold at auction in 2012 for almost 120 million dollars. Two of the versions have been stolen in daylight, one in 1994 during the Winter Olympics in Norway and another in 2004, and both were recovered.
Munch's The Scream appears on our: