The Scream

On the canvas

The cardboard nobody bothered to prime

Start with the thing reproductions never tell you: there is no canvas. The National Museum in Oslo lists the support plainly as cardboard, worked with tempera and oil crayon, with pastel in places, and no ground layer underneath. The sheet measures 91 by 73.5 centimetres — smaller than most people picture. The paint is thin and fast, and in several patches the brown board is simply left bare, doing the work of colour, shadow and open air.

One straight line holds the whole thing together: the railing of the road, cutting from the bottom right corner to the top left. Everything else bends — sky, water, hillside, figure. At the far end of the railing stand two men in top hats, backs turned, faces withheld. Below, two dark vessels sit on the fjord, and a strip of shoreline closes the horizon. The foreground figure is hairless, ageless, sexless, its head close to a skull, palms clamped to its cheeks. The mouth is open, yet by Munch's own account the person is not the one screaming. The person is shutting the sound out. The sky above is built from broad curved bands, and that may not be pure expression: a 2018 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society argued the pattern sits closer to nacreous clouds — a rare high-latitude winter phenomenon — than to a volcanic sunset.

Some details only exist at close range. Pale blobs on the surface were explained for decades as bird droppings or faulty material; in 2016 a team of physicists from the University of Antwerp scanned the board with macro X-ray fluorescence, took a micro-sample and identified wax — most likely dripped from a studio candle. There is also a line of pencil hidden in the red of the sky, legible up close and unmistakable under infrared.

How it was made

Nice, 22 January 1892

Nobody commissioned it. There was no deadline, no buyer, no wall waiting for it. There was a walk along the road below Ekeberg hill above Kristiania — Oslo's name until 1925 — and a diary entry Munch dated to Nice, 22 January 1892. The picture's first draft, in other words, was a sentence written in a hotel room two thousand kilometres from the spot it describes.

The direct ancestor hangs in Stockholm. Sick Mood at Sunset. Despair, 1892, oil on canvas, 92 by 67 centimetres, Thielska Galleriet: same railing, same bleeding sky, same fjord — but the man leans on the rail with his head down, seen from behind. A year later Munch swung the figure round to face us and scraped the face back to its bones. The museum calls that the decisive move, the point where form stopped illustrating the subject and became it.

The public first saw it abroad. In December 1893 Munch rented rooms on Unter den Linden in Berlin and hung a group of pictures gathered under the theme of love — the seed of what became the Frieze of Life. He then returned to the composition three more times: a pastel in 1895, a lithograph the same year printed in roughly forty-five impressions, and a tempera version in 1910. He reused the set once more in Anxiety (1894): same railing, same sky, but a crowd in black coming up the road. Norway itself only saw the picture in October 1895, at the Blomqvist gallery in Kristiania, where a medical student named Johan Scharffenberg stood up at a public debate and pronounced the artist not a normal man. The National Museum dates the pencil line in the sky to exactly that autumn.

Conservators are still arguing with the paint. A 2020 study in Science Advances found that the cadmium yellow in the 1910 version fades not chiefly from light, as had long been assumed, but from humidity: the pigment was poor quality and reacts to moisture, including the breath of visitors leaning in for a closer look.

Where the image comes from

Paris, Berlin and a run of family funerals

By 1893 Munch had buried half his family. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, when he was five; his sister Sophie in 1877, aged fifteen; his father in 1889. Another sister, Laura, lived with mental illness. He reworked The Sick Child (1885–86) for years and insisted he was painting not the scene at the bedside but his own memory of it. That is the road that leads straight here: the subject stops being an event and becomes a state.

The second source is three years in Paris, where he arrived in 1889 on a state stipend and studied briefly in Léon Bonnat's studio, and then the Berlin bohemia of the early 1890s — the Zum schwarzen Ferkel tavern, Strindberg, Przybyszewski, arguments about nerves and the unconscious that ran until morning. A sky behaving like a nervous system was not his invention alone: four years earlier Van Gogh had set the air spinning in The Starry Night. There is no evidence Munch ever saw that canvas, which makes the convergence more interesting, not less.

The face itself is disputed. In 1978 the art historian Robert Rosenblum proposed that both Munch and Gauguin had seen a Peruvian mummy of the Chachapoyas culture in Paris, its hands pressed to its face. It is an attractive hypothesis and nothing more; curators say openly that no document supports it. What is beyond argument is the manoeuvre Munch fixed here — turning an inner state outward and making it the entire subject — repeated ever since, right through to Frida Kahlo's The Two Fridas, where the pain is likewise laid on the surface of the canvas.

What happened next

A ladder, a postcard and fifty seconds

It entered the national collection peacefully enough: the collector Olaf Schou bought it and gave it to the National Gallery in 1910. After that the story turns into a police file. Munch himself died at his Ekely estate on 23 January 1944, leaving the city of Oslo more than a thousand paintings and tens of thousands of prints. Two further versions of the subject came with that bequest: the 1893 pastel and the 1910 tempera.

On 12 February 1994, the morning the Lillehammer Olympics opened, two men propped a ladder against the gallery wall, broke a window, cut the picture down with wire cutters and drove off. The whole raid took about fifty seconds. They left a postcard thanking the museum for its poor security. Norway refused the one-million-dollar ransom demand; instead Charley Hill of the Metropolitan Police posed as a Getty representative willing to buy stolen goods, and on 7 May 1994 the painting turned up undamaged in Åsgårdstrand. Four men were convicted in January 1996, among them Pål Enger, a former footballer who had already stolen a Munch in 1988.

The second theft, on 22 August 2004, was cruder. Armed men walked into the Munch Museum in broad daylight, in front of visitors, and carried off the 1910 version along with Madonna. Three of them were sentenced in May 2006 to between four and eight years — before the pictures resurfaced, which happened on 31 August that year. The damage was lighter than feared, but a tear and a moisture stain remained in the lower left corner. The restored painting went back on show on 23 May 2008 with the damp mark deliberately left visible.

The only version in private hands is the 1895 pastel. On 2 May 2012 the shipping heir Petter Olsen sent it to Sotheby's in New York, where the hammer fell at 119.9 million dollars; the buyer was the financier Leon Black. The 1893 original now hangs in the National Museum's new building, opened in 2022, while the MUNCH museum in Bjørvika shows its three versions in rotation in a darkened room, one at a time.

Cultural afterlife

A mask, an emoji and one huge misreading

In 1984 Andy Warhol produced his After Munch series — The Scream in acid colours, screenprinted, in editions. That was the diagnosis: the composition already worked as a logo, repaintable in any palette without losing a gram of recognisability. From there it went where paintings usually cannot follow. The Ghostface mask in Wes Craven's 1996 film was an off-the-shelf Fun World product designed by Brigitte Sleiertin around 1992; the crew found it by chance while scouting a location, and Craven immediately said the name Munch. The designer herself, for the record, cited the cartoon ghosts of the 1930s.

In 2010 Unicode 6.0 admitted a character called face screaming in fear — the yellow disc with palms at the cheeks. No museum signed off on it, and everyone catches the reference anyway. In little more than a century the picture has become a unit of measurement for panic, wheeled out for market crashes, deadlines and election nights.

Which brings us to the joke at the centre of it. The popular version inverts the original: in circulation the figure is screaming, whereas Munch's figure is shielding itself from a scream coming from outside. The image survives even that corruption, because it is built from a dozen lines and three smears and holds together on a T-shirt or in a sixteen-pixel square. That is the real trick: a private confession that turned out to need no caption at all.