Edvard Munch made five versions of The Scream: four by hand, on cardboard, and one lithograph, a black and white print. Three of the hand-made versions are in Oslo, and the fourth, a pastel from 1895, belongs to a private collector.
The best known, painted in 1893, is in the National Museum in Oslo. A second museum in the city, the Munch Museum, keeps a Scream from 1893 drawn in crayon and one painted around 1910.
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In the 1893 painting, a figure stands on a road in the foreground, its hands against its face and its mouth open. A railing runs behind it, two walkers come along the road, and above a blue fjord the sky burns in bands of orange and red.
High in the left of that sky, in small pencil letters, someone wrote a sentence in Norwegian: "Could only have been painted by a madman!" Nobody expects to find it there.
Who wrote it stayed an open question. In 1904, when the picture was shown in Copenhagen, a Danish critic spotted the line and took it for an insult left by a visitor.
A stranger or Munch himself, the answer matters to the people who care for the painting. A line added by a visitor is graffiti on someone else's work, and a conservator could remove it to bring the picture back to the state the painter left it in.
A line written by Munch is a different matter. It would be part of the work, as much as the red of the clouds, and it would have to stay.
A sentence in the sky
Conservators in Oslo first looked at the pencil under a microscope. It lies on top of dry paint, so the sentence Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand! was written after the picture was finished.
That narrowed down the moment but not the writer. A visitor at an exhibition could have held the pencil, and so could Munch.
What You'll Discover
Where the other three versions hang.
What a black and white print could do.
Why the last private version was sold.
The two thefts and the damage.