The Scream

Full analysis

Edvard Munch based The Scream on a memory he recorded in a diary entry: walking along a fjord-side path near Oslo at sunset, he felt suddenly exhausted and ill as the sky turned 'blood red,' and sensed 'an infinite scream passing through nature.' He worked the image through multiple versions between 1893 and 1910 — two painted versions (1893, National Museum of Norway, and 1910, Munch Museum), plus pastels and a widely circulated 1895 lithograph. The 1893 version is executed in oil, tempera, pastel, and crayon on cardboard, a deliberately unstable, non-precious combination of materials that suits the picture's raw urgency. Scholars have never settled what caused the sky's unnatural red: candidates include the atmospheric afterglow from the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, rare nacreous stratospheric clouds visible at Norway's latitude, or simply a subjective, non-meteorological rendering of Munch's own psychological state — most scholars now favor the view that Munch was not trying to record a specific sky, given that a slaughterhouse and a mental asylum (where his sister was institutionalized) both stood near the site depicted. Formally, the painting works by making the environment itself scream rather than the figure's mouth alone: the wavy, undulating lines of the sky, water, and railing all echo the curve of the open mouth, so the sound seems to radiate outward through the entire landscape. The androgynous, skull-like figure in the foreground is rendered with almost no anatomical specificity, which universalizes the terror rather than assigning it a particular sufferer. The diagonal bridge plunges sharply into the distance in exaggerated perspective, pulling the eye toward two distant figures who walk on, oblivious. Munch himself later added a barely visible pencil inscription in the upper left corner — 'Could only have been painted by a madman!' — apparently in response to hostile reviews.

Technique & materials

The primary 1893 version is worked in oil, tempera, pastel, and crayon on cardboard. Munch used sweeping, unbroken curved strokes to build the sky and water as continuous rhythmic bands, applying pigment thinly enough in places that the cardboard support shows through, flattening the space and heightening the graphic, almost woodcut-like quality that recurs in his lithographic version. The figure's face and hands were built with heavier, more opaque applications of pastel and crayon over the thinner oil ground.

Provenance

The 1893 painted version has remained in Norwegian public hands since its creation and is now held by the National Museum of Norway, the institution from which it was stolen in 1994. A separate 1895 pastel version passed through private hands: German industrialist Arthur von Franquet, then Berlin banker Hugo Simon in the 1920s–30s, who sold it around 1937 under circumstances his heirs later argued were coerced by Nazi-era persecution, to Norwegian shipping magnate Thomas Olsen; his family retained it until financier Leon Black bought it at Sotheby's in May 2012 for $119.9 million, then a record for a work sold at auction. The 1910 tempera version belongs to the Munch Museum, Oslo (part of the artist's own 1944 bequest), and was itself stolen in 2004 and recovered in 2006.

Conservation history

The 1893 version was stolen from the National Gallery, Oslo on 12 February 1994, timed to coincide with the Lillehammer Winter Olympics; recovered undamaged three months later. The 1910 version was stolen from the Munch Museum on 22 August 2004 along with Munch's Madonna, in an armed daylight robbery; recovered in 2006, that version had sustained moisture damage and several tears, repaired before returning to display in 2008. Because the paintings combine oil, tempera, pastel, and crayon on cardboard, both surviving painted versions are treated with heightened conservation caution.