Munch ado about nothing

The Scream (Edvard Munch, 1893)

The Scream was painted by Norwegian, Edvard Munch. One of its claims to fame being that it’s one of the few paintings that have been stolen twice, once in 1994 and then again in 2004. It has since been recovered which is unusual in itself as only 5% of stolen paintings are ever recovered. It is not, however, the most stolen painting. This dubious honour goes to Rembrant’s pocket-sized portrait of Jacob III of Chenyn which has been stolen and recovered a total of four times. Having finally cottoned on to the ’stealability’ of this particular piece it is now guarded by an upgraded security system.

But I’m not here to talk about thieving, I’ll leave that for another time. I’d like to bring to your attention the artist of The Scream because Edvard Munch is a pretty fascinating individual—in a dark, depressing sort of way. He referred to his paintings as ‘his children’ and had a tendency to spout such cheerful musings as “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.” And “for several years I was almost mad…You know my picture, ‘’The Scream?’’ I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again”.

Good times.

Munch’s mother died when he was young and so was raised by his father and Aunt. He was often sick as a child and grew up obsessed with death and felt for a lot of his life that he was insane. Although you can’t really blame him when his father used to tell him his dead mother was watching him and grieving over his misbehaviours and instead of bedtime tales like ‘three little pigs’ he got the ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Out of the five Munch children, only one married who then promptly changed his mind and snuffed it a couple of months later (I do hear marriage makes you lose the will to live).

Edvard became even more of a misery-guts when he started surrounding himself with such cheerful souls as Hans Jægar, a nihilist who believed ‘the passion to destroy is also a creative passion’ and who advocated suicide as the ultimate freedom. What with Edvard and his obsession with misery and Hans contemplating suicide at every turn, you can just imagine the riveting conversation that would have flowed between those two.

It was upon Jægar’s suggestion that Edvard started writing his “soul’s diary” where he came upon the inspiration for The Scream. “I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature”.

Edvard Munch ended his days in relative seclusion with almost his entire collection of artworks. He feared confiscation by the Nazis who had taken a dislike to his and other contemporary painters’ work due to Hitler  announcing “For all we care, those prehistoric Stone Age culture barbarians and art-stutterers can return to the caves of their ancestors and there can apply their primitive international scratching”. About eighty of his paintings were removed from German museums, eleven of which have never been recovered. To add insult to injury, when he died his funeral was orchestrated in such a way as to make it appear he was a Nazi sympathizer. Bastards.

Edvard Munch self portrait

So here’s to Edvard Munch who may have been a miserable fellow but at least he wasn’t a Nazi.