Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, from 1893, is one of the world’s most famous paintings, but for years art historians have mostly ignored a tiny inscription, written in pencil, at the upper left corner of its frame, reading: “Could only have been painted by a madman.”
A new study conducted in collaboration with the Munch Museum has shed new light on the original 1893 version of The Scream. The curators at Norway’s National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design have confirmed that it was written by the Norwegian artist himself.
Using infrared technology to analyze the handwriting and compare it with Munch’s diaries and letters, researchers determined that Munch was indeed the short text’s author. The artist probably wrote the sentence in 1895 or in response to the criticism he got after after exhibiting The Scream in his native Kristiania for the first time.
Credit-National Museum of Norway
“The writing is without a doubt Munch’s own,” Mai Britt Guleng, curator at the National Museum said. “The handwriting itself, as well as events that happened in 1895, when Munch showed the painting in Norway for the first time, all point in the same direction,” she said.
The viewers were taken back by the agony and pain of the artist saying the figure in the center of the painting is the artist himself. A medical student Johan Scharffenberg even stated that Munch’s work showed that he was not sane rather clearly. As there was a history of mental illness in his family, the artist feared that he inherited that.
According to a diary entry, Munch conceived of The Scream while walking out at sunset in Kristiania where, upon viewing the blood red clouds, he sensed an “infinite scream passing through nature.” Munch created four versions of The Scream, two in pastel and the other two in paint, plus a lithograph stone for prints. In a diary entry, the artist recalled how the painting came to be: “I sensed a scream passing through nature … I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.”
The National Museum, where the work, along with other pieces by Munch, are located, is currently under construction in Oslo. It will reopen in 2022.