by Robert E. A. Lee

     There it was, with photos, on the front page of my New York Times this morning. “A Scream is Silenced in a Robbery”. The inside story reported on how thieves at gunpoint removed two precious paintings in broad daylight from the Oslo, Norway Munch museum. One was Madonna, valued at between U.S. $30 and $50 million and the other, the world-famous Skrik, in English known as The Scream, said to be worth over $100 million U.S. dollars.

     My daughter phoned me with the news first. Peg and I had visited the government-sponsored Museet on our trip to Norway last summer. It had been high on my wish list of attractions (among so many in that country of our heritage) to visit. We had talked about seeking out The Scream among the many works of the artist Edvard Munch, who died in 1944 at age 81, after having spent half his life in the Twentieth Century and half in the Nineteenth. After passing dozens of impressionistic and also more literally realistic interpretations of various sizes (the huge 1912 painting of The Sun II covered an entire wall of one room and The Galloping Horse of the same period dominated another panel), we came to the less-large-but-most-famous centerpiece of the gallery.

     In The Scream, the central figure of the man (or maybe it’s a woman) might be crying because of fear or mental turmoil. The mask-like face of the protagonist is ghostly and looks like a skull. The sound of pain is somehow emanating from that primitive head. Hands cover the ears. We can’t tell if the scream is actually piercing the air or is a silent scream. We sense that the two shadowy male figures watching at a distance are alerted to the condition of the poor soul ahead of them, standing alone on the board walk by the sea. Will she (or he) make a suicidal leap into the sea?

     Munch has filled the vertical frame with undulating color – a red and yellow sunset, with the blood ribbons on the horizon casting a long red shadow on the path. Flowing lines etch the waves riding on the bay, its blue-green water streaked with veins of sky-red reflections. The hills of the Oslo Fjord rise on the distant shore and near them are tiny figures of two ships. They float within a whirl-pool, adding to the atmospheric chaos.

     What does this sad, moody, emotional painting mean? We wouldn’t need the title to tell us; one glance says it all. But in his writing, obviously commenting on this painting, Munch tells us about it in his own words:

     I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

     It is said that the melancholy torment reflected in so much of this artist’s work comes from grief over the early deaths of his young sister and his parents when he was still a schoolboy. He wrote, From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood by my side, followed me out while I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation.” Some of us who also grew up in the tradition of stern Nordic Lutheran legalism, even though it has moderated considerably over the years, can understand that religious intimidation.

     We find a dramatic Nordic gloom in many of Munch’s paintings. Even Madonna has a heavy weariness to it. There seems little religious significance to this semi-nude portrait of a woman who is either sleeping or in a trance as she floats on a maroon-draped bed. When recovered, neither of the stolen paintings is likely to be up for sale inasmuch as Munch at the end of his life bequeathed all his remaining art to the city of Oslo.

     Munch, whose younger years were spent partly within the artist colonies of Paris and Berlin in the volatile 1880’s, and 1890’s and at the turn of the century, returned to Norway in 1910 and lived alone in a small flat in Oslo. But he had friends – Henrik Ibsen was one and Munch designed some stage settings for him.

     The robbery on Sunday August 22nd made instant news around the world. There were dozens of tourists (some from the United States) who were witnesses. The masked gunmen lifted the two paintings right off the wall and carried them out to a waiting station wagon. The police quickly found the abandoned Audi and located the escape path that led to a nearby tennis club. It was a daring heist and the authorities predicted an early capture. Unloading a work like that in any art market, legitimate or not, appeared to be almost futile. A ransom request, reportedly, was expected.

     Some of us who can visit museums and treasure illustrated art books, while grateful for the legacy of such artist-geniuses as Munch, need to realize that appreciation of this medium of visual communication is not broadly shared. Much of it due to the competition of cinema and television (including videos and DVDs) and ever new devices that offer entertainment as substitute stimulation for the mind via our eyes. Elitism is the initiative for sharing authentic visual arts while at the same time defining the limitation of their reach.

     The Munch painting thieves, assuming these rare gems of art are returned unharmed, may have given us a lesson in the power of what has been termed as “event communication” that follows crime, scandal, conflict and controversy. It excites people and stimulates curiosity for learning and discovery of subjects they had not known much about before.

     All of this because of a moody, morose, gloomy, but highly talented and creative, Norwegian genius!

Note: On Thursday, August 21, 2006, the Oslo, Norway, police recovered the two Munch paintings that were stolen in August of 2004 from the Munch Museum. The artwork was apparently unharmed.

Page last modified by Richard Lee on 31 August 2006