The Evening Nature Screamed
One evening in the early 1890s, Edvard Munch was walking along a fjord path overlooking Oslo when the setting sun turned the clouds "a blood red". What happened next he recorded in his diary: he sensed "an infinite scream passing through nature". Out of that moment came the 1893 composition he named simply *Skrik* — Scream.
What made that sky so violently orange? Theories abound: the atmospheric afterglow of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, which reddened sunsets worldwide for months; rare mother-of-pearl nacreous clouds that form at Norway's latitude; or no sky at all, but a state of mind. The path he walked ran near the asylum where his sister Laura was committed — and a slaughterhouse. Munch, scholars agree, painted the feeling, not the weather.
Written in Pencil: "Only a Madman"
The Scream is not one artwork but a family: two painted versions (1893 and 1910), two pastels (1893 and 1895), and a lithograph stone from which about 45 prints were pulled. The agonized figure against the swirling sky became, in one critic's words, "an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time".
The 1893 painting holds a secret. In its upper-left corner, barely visible, someone wrote in pencil: *"could only have been painted by a madman!"* For decades it was assumed to be a vandal's sneer. Infrared photography settled it — the handwriting is Munch's own, likely added after critics savaged the painting's first exhibition in 1895. The artist answered his reviewers inside the artwork itself.
Stolen Twice, Recovered Twice
The Scream may be the most stolen masterpiece in modern history. On February 12, 1994 — the opening day of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics — thieves took the 1893 version from Norway's National Gallery, leaving a note: "Thanks for the poor security." They demanded $1 million. Instead, a sting operation with British undercover officers recovered the painting undamaged within three months — though the convictions were overturned because the foreign agents had entered Norway under false identities.
Ten years later it got worse. In August 2004, masked gunmen stormed the Munch Museum in daylight and ripped the 1910 Scream and Munch's *Madonna* off the walls. Rumors claimed the paintings had been burned. Two years later police recovered both — The Scream with moisture damage in one corner — and in 2008 they returned to display in an exhibition pointedly titled *Scream and Madonna – Revisited*.
From Fjord Path to Emoji
In May 2012, the 1895 pastel version came to auction at Sotheby's New York. Bidding opened at $40 million and ran for over twelve minutes; financier Leon Black won at $119,922,500 — at the time, the highest price ever paid for any artwork at public auction.
By then the image had long escaped the frame. The screaming-face emoji on your phone descends from it. Andy Warhol silk-screened it, the *Home Alone* poster mimicked it, and the U.S. Department of Energy even considered a simplified version as a warning symbol for radioactive sites. One myth deserves correction, though: the ghost-faced mask from the *Scream* films was not based on Munch's figure — its designer drew from old cartoons. The dread, however, is pure Munch.
