Silent scream

08 May 2006

At around 11:10am on Sunday, 22 August 2004, two armed men walked into the Munch Museum in Oslo. They put a gun to the head of the only security guard on duty, took two paintings off the wall as incredulous gallery visitors looked on, and walked outside to a waiting Audi where a third man drove them off into the well-trodden halls of infamy. Oslo is a staid, northern European city with a patrician air, the sort of place where Sunday mornings are more for attending church than the unsettling disturbances of major art thefts. Having left Oslo a week before the theft, I find it hard to imagine the city being capable of such monumental events. Architecturally undistinguished and with a pulse that eludes all but long-term residents, the Norwegian capital’s saving grace is the fact that it boasts one of Europe’s more impressive collections of Western art; a collection distinguished with paintings by Gauguin, Picasso, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Matisse, El Greco and Cézanne. The centrepiece of this superb gathering of paintings is the body of work by the home-grown Edvard Munch. The stolen paintings were two of Munch’s masterpieces. The Scream—one of Western art’s most recognisable images—is a deeply disturbing work, an ‘icon of existential angst’ captured in the face of a waif-like girl set against a sky the colour of blood. The other stolen work, Madonna, is similarly dark and compelling, the raven-haired woman at its centre a figure of mystery. But it is The Scream which has captured worldwide attention. Painted with pastel on fragile cardboard, The Scream formed part of a series called ‘The Frieze of Life’, a tortuous and haunting collection of four very similar paintings by Munch in his pursuit of love, angst and death. The original painting known as The Scream now hangs in Oslo’s National Gallery, with the other two in the series held by the Munch Museum and a private collector. Perhaps it is the profound distress and vulnerability of the painting’s subject which has crystallised the world’s horror at the theft. More likely it is because The Scream, albeit the National Gallery’s version, has been stolen before. It was on 12 February 1994—the day of the opening ceremony of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics and when Norwegians were basking in the glow of the world’s attention—that a passing policeman noticed a ladder propped up against the wall of the National Gallery. Inside, in place of

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Silent scream

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