painting - The Scream
Photograph by anarchosynon Flickr.
In 2004, The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum. In painting 1994, the version in the National Gallery was stolen.
A fourth version, in pastel, is owned by Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen. During the administration of George H.
It was used on the cover of some editions painting Renaissance art of Arthur Janov s book The Primal Scream. As one of very few works of modern art that are instantly recognizable to a broad audience, Scream has been used in advertising, in cartoons, such as The Simpsons, and films and on TV. Bush a popular poster showed the painting with the caption President Quayle. Bumper Stickers were sold in 2004 with the image paired with the caption of Four More Years? In August 2006, Masterfoods USA, the maker of M&M s candies, began using Scream in ads for its dark chocolate variety of candies and offered a reward of two million of the candies for the painting s return.
W. Ghostface, the murderer in Wes Craven s Scream horror movies, wears a Halloween mask inspired by the central figure in the painting, and reproductions can be found at various retail stores during Halloween. The work has also been used in political humor and advertisement.
The Norwegian word skrik is usually translated as scream, but is cognate with the English shriek. Masterfoods has announced its intention to honor the reward once the recovered painting is authenticated. Munch translated Scream into lithograph in 1895. This version, executed in 1910 in tempera on cardboard, was stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004, and recovered in 2006. .
Both paintings were recovered in 2006. On August 22, during daylight hours, masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum in Oslo and stole two paintings: Scream and Munch s Madonna. On 31 August 2006, Norwegian police announced that a police operation had recovered both Scream and Madonna, but did not reveal detailed circumstances of the recovery.
The damage was much less than feared. In the late twentieth century, The Scream acquired iconic status in popular culture. They had sustained some damage and went back on display in May 2008, after undergoing restoration. The original German title given to the work by Munch was Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature).
The National Gallery of Norway holds the other painted version (1893, shown to right). This mummy, which was crouching in a fetal position with its hands alongside its face, also struck the imagination of Munch s friend Paul Gauguin: it stood model for the central figure in his painting Human misery (Grape harvest at Arles) and for the old woman at the left in his painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?.
Munch also created a lithograph (1895, see gallery) of the image. The Scream has been the target of several high-profile art thefts. Occasionally, the painting has been called The Cry. In a page in his diary headed Nice 22.01.1892, Munch described his inspiration for the image thus: One theory advanced to account for the reddish sky in the background is that Munch had observed a powerful volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883: the ash that was ejected from the volcano left the sky tinted red in much of eastern United States and most of Europe and Asia from the end of November 1883 to mid February 1884. The scene was identified as being the view from a road overlooking Oslo, the Oslofjord and Hovedøya, from the hill of Ekeberg.
More recently, an Italian anthropologist speculated that Munch might have seen a mummy in Florence s Museum of Natural History which bears an even more striking resemblance to the painting. The environment of The Scream is often compared to that of which an individual suffering from Depersonalization disorder experiences, such a feeling of distortion of the environment and one s self. The image may represent the pain and agony experienced in organic diseases such as trigeminal neuralgia, a paralysing all encompassing pain. On February 12, 1994, the same day as the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, four men broke into the National Gallery and stole its version of Scream, leaving a note reading Thanks for the poor security . Another version of The Scream was stolen in 2004.
At the time of painting the work, Munch s manic depressive sister Laura Catherine was interned in the mental hospital at the foot of Ekeberg. In 1978, the Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested that the strange, sexless creature in the foreground of the painting was probably inspired by a Peruvian mummy, which Munch could have seen at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was recovered several months later.
Shortly after the promotion was announced, the painting was recovered. The Scream (Norwegian: Skrik; created 1893-1910) is the title of expressionist paintings and prints in a series by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, depicting an agonized figure against a blood red sky.
The landscape in the background is Oslofjord, viewed from the hill of Ekeberg, in Oslo (then Kristiania), Norway. Edvard Munch created several versions of The Scream in various media. We are 100 percent certain they are the originals, police chief Iver Stensrud told a news conference.
