Art

The Scream has been the target of several high-profile art thefts. In 1994, the version in the National Gallery was stolen. It was recovered several months later. In 2004, The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum, and recovered two years later.  Edvard Munch created several versions of The Scream in various media. The National Gallery, Oslo holds one of two painted versions (1893, shown to right). The Munch Museum holds the other painted version (1910, see gallery) and one pastel. A fourth version (1895), in pastel, is owned by Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, and is the version that will be offered at auction on May 2, 2012 at Sotheby's New York.  It is estimated to sell for as much as $80 million. Munch also created a lithograph of the image in 1895.  As the defining image of the Expressionist movement, The Scream stands as a pivotal work in the history of art. Munch created the image in the mid-1890s as the central element of his celebrated Frieze of Life series. The powerfully-rendered, blood-red sky presents the viewer with the reality of Munch's experience at the moment he is gripped by anxiety in the hills above Oslo. Like his Dutch contemporary Vincent van Gogh, Munch's desire was to paint a new form of reality rooted in psychological experience, rather than visual. It is this projection of Munch's mental state that was so artistically innovative – a landscape of the mind, whose impact is still felt in the art of today.

In a page in his diary headed: Nice 22.01.1892, Munch described his inspiration for the image as follows: 

I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

An icon of global visual culture, The Scream is instantly recognizable – from Beijing to Moscow to New York. Since its creation at the turn of the 20th century, the provocative work has only gained relevance and impact over time. The haunting composition stands as the visual embodiment of modern anxiety and existential dread, referenced by everyone from Andy Warhol to The Simpsons. Edvard Munch and The Scream have been the subject of countless books, scholarly articles, films and museum exhibitions.

Munch created four versions of The Scream. The prime example, worked in 1893 from tempera and crayon on board, is in the National Gallery of Norway; another pastel version from the same year is thought to be a preliminary sketch for the work, and is owned by the Munch Museum in Oslo; the present work from the Olsen Collection, created in 1895 from pastel on board, most closely follows the prime composition in the National Gallery; and a later version in tempera and oil on board, thought to be completed in 1910, is also in the collection of the Munch Museum. In addition, Munch created a lithograph of the image in 1895, which helped initiate the process of its mass proliferation.

Of the four versions of the work, the present Scream is distinguished in several remarkable ways: it is the most colorful and vibrant of the four; the only version whose original frame was hand-painted by the artist to include his poem detailing the work's inspiration; and the only version in which one of the two figures in the background turns to look outward onto the cityscape. This version has never before been on public view in either the UK or US, except briefly in the National Gallery in Washington D.C. decades ago.  The Scream has been in the collection of the Olsen family for over 70 years. Thomas Olsen, scion of the great ship-owning dynasty, was a collector and supporter of Munch from the late 1920s. Olsen and the artist were neighbors at Hvitsten in Norway, where the young businessman's role grew from friend to patron and eventually to protector of his works.

Some of his Most Famous Paintings include: 

          The Sick Child (1895-97)               August Strindber (1892)                   Vampire (1893-94)      

                   Ashes (1894)                                           Madonna (1894-95)                  Death in the Sickroom (1895)                
                

                       Lady From the Sea (1896)                                                                                    Dance of Live (1899)                      

  Death of Marat (1907)

Edvard Munch was also Known for His Famous Quotes:

• A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself
• By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life
• Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light
• Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life
• For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art
• From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity
• I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me
• I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter
• I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell
• I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell
• I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw
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• I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available
• In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color
• In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head
• It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it
• Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul
• No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love
• Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?
• One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor
• Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness