Crazy, Edvard Munch?
According to the curators of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design of Norway, the painter is the author of the inscription
"can only have been painted by a madman",
located at the top of the first painting in the series of the
Scream.
The institution, owner of the work, has just made its conclusions in a press release published on Monday.
To read also: Edvard Munch without a "Scream"
Written in pencil in the top left corner of the canvas, the few words in Norwegian have long fueled conjectures about the identity of their author.
The most common thesis until now was that they were the legacy of a visitor outraged by the work which represents a ghostly figure with a pale face in front of celestial vaults in bright colors.
But an infrared thermography examination, carried out by the National Museum of Norway, led to another conclusion.
Read also: Hold your breath in front of
Le
Cri
de Munch or it will disappear forever
Snubbing his detractors
“The inscription is without a doubt from Munch,”
said research curator Mai Britt Guleng, adding that
“the writing itself, as well as the events that occurred in 1895, when Munch showed the picture in Norway for the first time, all point in the same direction ”
.
According to the curator, it seems that this strange remark echoes an insult that a medical student, Johan Scharffenberg, allegedly hurled at Munch during the first exhibition of the work, in 1895 in the Blomqvist gallery in Oslo.
Critics had flared from time to time and Scharffenberg was not the only one to accuse the artist of madness.
And for good reason: a pioneer of expressionism, Munch was haunted by the feeling of anguish nourished by the premature death of relatives, in particular that of his mother and his sister Johanne Sophie, carried away by illness.
In 1908, he was even temporarily placed in a psychiatric establishment.
This version of the
Scream
, which was stolen in 1994, the day of the opening of the Olympic Winter Games in Lillehammer, before being found a few months later, will again be exhibited to the public on the occasion of the planned opening. for 2022 from the National Museum of Norway.
The new institution will bring together the collections of several establishments.