Final secret of Edvard Munchâs âThe Screamâ revealed
A barely legible phrase scribbled on a modern masterpiece gives new insight into the private thoughts of one of the worldâs great painters.
Researchers in Norway used infrared photography to analyse the mysterious words scrawled on Edvard Munchâs âThe Screamâ. Â
Annar Bjorgli/The National Museum
Nina Siegal
Save
Share
Edvard Munchâs
The Scream, from 1893, is one of the worldâs 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: âCould only have been painted by a madmanâ.
Art Mystery Solved: Who Wrote on Edvard Munchâs âThe Screamâ?
The authorship of the tiny inscription, âCould only have been painted by a madman,â was disputed. Curators in Oslo say the artist definitely wrote it himself. (But why?)
Edvard Munchâs âThe Scream.âCredit.National Museum of Norway
By Nina Siegal
Feb. 21, 2021
Edvard Munchâs âThe Scream,â from 1893, is one of the worldâs 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: âCould only have been painted by a madman.â
Who wrote the sentence there? Some thought a disgruntled viewer might have vandalized the work while it was in a gallery; others imagined it was the artist himself who had jotted the enigmatic sentence. But then why?
“It’s been examined now very carefully, letter by letter, and word by word, and it’s identical in every way to Munch’s handwriting,” said Mai Britt Guleng, the museum’s curator of old masters and modern paintings, who was in charge of the research. “So there is no more doubt.”
This certainly does sound decisive! The museum’s findings run counter to the assumption made by art historians for decades that it was an unscrupulous museum visitor who scrawled the remark perhaps like the sort of opinion-based commentary on a property we’d now produce on Twitter rather than in pencil.