In this article I invite you to know The Scream by Edvard Munch, a collection of four paintings that the artist painted, which when viewed by viewers tend to be shocked by the sensation that a painting valued at 120 million dollars produces in people. Keep reading this article!
The Scream by Edvard Munch
They are a set of paintings entitled Edvard Munch's scream, which in the Norwegian language is known as Skrik. The four paintings were painted by the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944). The four original paintings remain in the National Gallery of Norway since it was completed in 1893. Although there are two more versions of the painting The Scream by Edvard Munch in the Munch Museum located in the city of Oslo.
Similarly, there is a particular version of the work the scream of Edvard Munch that was completed in 1895. Although the painter Edvard Munch made a lithograph with the title of the scream of Edvard Munch.
The work of Edvard Munch's cry has been to try to steal on several occasions, in this way it is news in the world. In the year of 1994 Edvard Munch's scream an attempt was made to steal it from the National Gallery of Norway where it rests. But the police intervened, which led to the whereabouts of the work twelve weeks later.
In August 2004, one of the versions of Edvard Munch's scream that was on display at the Munch Museum was stolen. But this was recovered two years later. Since on August 31, 2006 the Norwegian police gave the news that the painting was found and was in good condition.
There is a version of Edvard Munch's scream, which is under the responsibility of the Norwegian and multimillionaire Peter Olsen, since his father had been a friend and neighbor of the painter Edvard Munch, later becoming a tutor to the painter.
Billionaire Peter Olsen decided to auction Edvard Munch's scream on May 02, 2012 for the astronomical amount of 112,9 million dollars. At an auction house known as Sotheby's in New York, being declared the most expensive work and sold at auction.
In all existing versions of Edvard Munch's The Scream, they will show an androgynous figure at first. At that moment, a modern man is symbolized who is anguished and has total despair. The landscape that has the work of art is the city of Oslo observed from the Ekeberg hill.
Edvard Munch's Scream is considered one of the Norwegian works and the artist Edvard Munch as very important within the world of art and the expressionist movement. The scream of Edvard Munch has been the work as a cultural image that is compared to the Mona Lisa that Leonardo Da Vinci painted in his time.
Edvard Munch's version of the scream is painted in many colors in a warm tone. At the same time, it has a semi-dark background and the main figure of the work is of a person who finds himself tormented on a bridge or path that gradually disappears from view outside the scene of the painting.
This figure seems to be screaming, since he has an expression that something is making him desperate and at the end of the scene in the background of the painting there are two figures wearing hats which cannot be distinguished if they are men or women. The entire landscape of the work is swirled, as well as the figure and the background of the painting.
History of the work of art
The history of the work that the artist painted could be an inspiration for the tormented life he lived, since the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was educated by a very rigorous and severe father, since the artist as a child saw his mother die one of his sisters for tuberculosis disease.
In the early 1890s another of Edvard Munch's sisters was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had to be committed to a psychiatric sanatorium. She was the sister with whom the Norwegian artist shared the most. This was a great blow to his state of mind, as he wrote in his diary the following words:
“I was walking along a path with two friends; the sun went down Suddenly, the sky turned blood red, I stopped and leaned against a fence dead tired: blood and tongues of fire lurked on the dark blue of the fjord and the city. My friends continued and I stood still, trembling with anxiety. I felt an infinite scream that went through nature”
These words by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch were reflected in a painting that he painted, which he titled as The Despair. He is depicted as a man wearing a top hat, sideways, and leaning on a railing. The stage of the play is also very similar to his famous play, The Scream.
Although the painter Edvard Munch is not very happy after finishing his work, he decides to paint a new painting. This time the figure he paints is more androgynous and in this new painting the face of that figure is more contemplative and more desperate than the previous one.
Although many specialists affirm that it is an improved version of his famous work the scream of Edvard Munch. It is also affirmed by Robert Rosenblum, a scholar of the work The Scream, where he says that the artist's source of inspiration was based on making a stylized figure of a human body very similar to a mummy from Peru that the Norwegian artist was observing at a Universal exhibition in the city of Paris in the year 1889.
Edvard Munch's painting of the scream was exhibited in the year 1893 for the first time. This painting was part of a group of six works by the artist entitled Love. The artist had the idea of being able to represent the different phases of the idyll, since it begins with the initial infatuation and ends with the dramatic breakup.
That is why Edvard Munch's The Scream is going to represent the last stage that is wrapped in anguish. The work of the scream was very well received by the public since there were very good reviews. She was called by the name of Clement art. Over time, the Nazi regime came to classify the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch as a degenerate.
In this way the four paintings of the work The Scream were withdrawn from Nazi Germany in the exhibition that was held in that country. A critic of German origin commented that he found the painting of the Scream very disturbing until he even said that pregnant women should not see the exhibition because it could harm the baby.
Although the German public was a little confused and stunned by the exhibition of the works, since The Scream by Edvard Munch was the subject of controversies and discussions by specialists that reached the newspapers of the time.
The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch made four paintings of the work The Scream, the first and known as the original is made with a mixed technique of oil and pastel on cardboard. It has the following dimensions (91 x 73,5 cm). The work is on public display at the National Gallery in Oslo.
The second work of the scream has the following dimensions 83,5 x 66 cm and is on public display at the Munch Museum in the city of Oslo. This work was done in tempera on cardboard. This was the stolen work in 2004. But the police found it exactly two years later on August 31, 2006 in very good condition. Together with another work by the artists known as The Madonna.
The third work of the scream is in the same museum. While the fourth is owned by an individual who has it very well protected. In the year 1895, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch began to make a lithograph of the work The Scream, for which he was able to print the painting for magazines and newspapers.
Main thefts of the work
Edvard Munch's Scream was stolen on February 12, 1994, from the National Gallery in Oslo. The robbery was carried out in broad daylight by a gang of thieves that was made up of high-class thieves and were the most wanted by the law.
First there was the idea that it was a group for the protection of human rights in Norway. But later it emerged that the criminal organization was run by the most famous art thief of the time known as Pål Enger;
The master robbery was executed in a time of approximately 50 seconds, the same intellectual and material author recognized that he had committed the crime in the time estimated in the affidavit that he made in the Norwegian police command.
According to the thief who kept the painting hidden between the boards of his dining room table. When the thief executed the robbery of the work the cry of Edvard Munch. He had the luxury of leaving a written note that said “Thanks for the lack of security”
Three months after committing the theft of the works, the criminal gang sent a letter to the Norwegian government asking it to pay a ransom for the work, demanding the amount of one million dollars in US currency. But the Norwegian government refused the thieves' request.
On May 07 of the same year, in a joint action with the Norwegian police and Scotland Yard (this is how the London police are known). He also assisted the staff of the Getty museum.
On August 22, 2004, in the version of Edvard Munch's scream that was exhibited at the Munch Museum, it was robbed by three masked men in broad daylight, the robbery was carried out with weapons as an ordinary robbery, at that time the work was stolen along with another painting called The Madonna.
The Munch museum offered a large reward of 97 million euros so that the work known as the scream by Edvard Munch would be returned together with the painting by The Madonna. Since there was no more news about the stolen works.
The only one that gave clues and news about the theft of the work Edvard Munch's scream, was the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, which published a news that the work of art was burned in order to eliminate the traces and evidence left by the perpetrators. .
But on August 31, 2006, both paintings were recovered by the intervention of the Norwegian police, the search lasted two years, although it was first asserted that the work the scream of Edvard Munch was found in perfect condition.
On December 20 of that year, the specialists concluded that the work had a great deterioration that was irreparable due to the humidity it suffered, since in the lower part of the painting the humidity caused a discoloration that will prevent the painting from can be restored to its original state.
The scream as stamp work
In the month of December of the year 1895, the work the scream of Edvard Munch. The magazine La Revue Blanche makes a publication in the lithographic version of the work the scream. From that moment on, a starting point was marked for the public to identify with the work and with the painter's thought.
In the middle years of the 1961th century, the play The Scream gained great fame as a Norwegian cultural play, this began in the period of World War II. Then in the year XNUMX the magazine Time uses the work The Scream by Edvard Munch as the cover for a special edition that is dedicated to the anxiety and guilt complexes that human beings have.
In the years 1983 and 1984, Andy Warhol, a pop artist of American origin, dedicated himself to making a series of prints of Edvard Munch's work The Scream in silk. He had the idea of desacralizing the work and turning it into an object to be able to reproduce them en masse.
The reproduction that was made to the work the scream. In all kinds of products where the image of the work could be stamped, such as shirts, mugs, posters, key chains, among many other things, its main purpose was to desecrate the work in order to end what the public felt when observing the work. Since many felt an emotional force with the work known as the scream.
This work has been compared according to various art specialists with the Mona Lisa painted by the Great Leonardo Da Vinci. The trivialization of the work is interpreted as an attempt to deactivate the feeling of discomfort that the viewer feels when observing the work of art carefully.
The North American Robert Fishbone, who is a prominent muralist, discovers a great opportunity in the market when, in 1991, he begins to sell inflatable dolls that carry as a central figure The Scream by Edvard Munch. The company of this muralist located in the city of San Luis. He sold thousands of these dolls.
Critics pointed out that by taking the figure of the scream out of context he had destroyed what the work of Edvard Munch's scream generated to the spectators, that expressive force that painting has. In this way, the Mexican painter Mauricio García Vega also made a version of the scream but in black and white. But this did not generate such a reaction in people as the original work of Edvard Munch.
Biography of Edvard Munch
The Norwegian painter and printmaker known as Edvard Munch, creator of the scream, produced evocative works about anguish that had a great impact on German expressionism at the beginning of the XNUMXth century.
The painter was born on December 12, 1863 in the city of Loten, Norway. He was the son of a soldier and doctor named Christian Munch, his mother was named Laura Cathrine, the childhood that the painter Edvard Munch had was very complex since his mother and sister died of tuberculosis.
His father died in 1889. From all this the painter experienced, he had a very conflictive and somewhat unbalanced personality, but he considered that his creative genius was a point in his favor. Of the five brothers he had, only his sister Andrea would get married, but she also died a few months after getting married.
In the year 1879 the young artist began studying engineering at the university but a year later he abandoned it to continue his artistic career and thus began his art career in expressionism. In the year 1881 the painter manages to sell his first two paintings.
In the year 1885 he began to make trips to the city of Paris, in that city he began to meet multiple artistic movements at that time he felt very attracted to the art of Gauguin. He begins to know the museums, including the Louvre museum, which greatly impressed him.
There he begins to make his paintings since he is influenced by impressionist and post-impressionist painting. He paints three paintings which were The Day After, Puberty and The Sick Girl, these paintings caused great scandal at the autumn exhibition in the city of Oslo in the year of 1886.
For the year 1890 the painter Edvard Munch begins to have more notoriety and receives a scholarship, a year later he makes the motifs of the Frieze of life, then he makes a series of works where his unitary vision of life is reflected.
In the year 1892 he moved to Berlin to live making several trips to Paris and Norway. In the city of Berlin he held an exhibition of his works but it caused a great scandal which had to be withdrawn due to the scandal it caused among the spectators.
In the year 1893, the painter establishes many relationships with several artists in a place known as the Black Cochinillo. Also in that year he gives life to his most famous work which is the cry of Edvard Munch. The paintings made by the painter are reflecting diseases, religious obsession and death.
Between the years 1894 and 1897 the painter stands out in his paintings while holding exhibitions in Stockholm and in other countries. The most successful exhibition was in the studio of Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard and Vuillard. There he created several sketches.
In the year 1903 he began to sell his works, as well as a large exhibition at the Cassirer Gallery in Berlin, at that time the artist became famous by holding several exhibitions in the city of Copenhagen. The Academy of Fine Arts gives him a workshop so that he can make his works of art. In the year 1905, it was very difficult for the painter since he had to face neurasthenia and alcoholism.
For the year 1906 the film producer Max Reinhardt hires him to design the sets for his new film entitled Ibsen's Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, in the same way he tells him to make a frieze for one of the halls of the Berlin theater. In the year 1908 the painter suffers a nervous breakdown that spends half the year confined to the sanatorium.
In the year 1909 Rasmus Meyer makes a purchase from him for several paintings he has painted. He also mounts a big exhibition in the city of Oslo. The artist is very successful with his works, especially Edvard Munch's scream. But he is also suffering from various nervous breakdowns. He starts visiting Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Paris, London, Stockholm, Hamburg, Lübeck and Copenhagen. He received many honors on the occasion of his fiftieth anniversary as early as 1913.
The year 1940 arrives and the beginning of the Second World War and the Nazi regime invades Norway where several of his paintings that were on continuous exhibition in Norwegian museums were removed. Because these scandalized the visitors.
Turning 80 years old, the painter Edvard Munch becomes very famous for his paintings since the Nazi regime claimed that his paintings scandalize viewers. That he mounts a great exhibition in the United States. In that country he is honored despite his many illnesses. In the year of 1944, on January 23, the painter died at his farm outside the city of Oslo.
After his death, Ekely will donate a number of paintings to the city of Oslo, including the most important painting The Scream by Edvard Munch. That over time is going to be valued at more than 120 million dollars.
If you have found this article about The Scream by Edvard Munch important, I invite you to visit the following links: