It has been stolen and recovered twice, sold for £74 million and now, for the first time in a decade, Edvard Munch’s The Scream is coming to London.
A rare monochrome print of the famous image, which has adorned book covers, inspired Halloween masks and even pub signs, will be the centrepiece of a new British Museum show. Edvard Munch: Love And Angst will focus on dozens of prints the Norwegian expressionist made of his works, including The Scream.
The original painting was created in 1893 inspired by the wild skies of the artist’s native Scandinavia. That version was stolen by two thieves who walked into the National Gallery in Oslo on the same day as the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics and took it off the wall. A 1910 copy was stolen a decade later when masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum in the Norwegian capital.
Both copies were later recovered, while a pastel version of The Scream took just over 12 minutes to sell for £74 million at auction in New York in 2012. Only about 15 copies of the black and white lithograph survive after the matrix, which Munch used to transfer the ink on to the paper, was destroyed. It will join almost 50 prints from the Munch Museum as well as photographs and postcards that trace his travels throughout Europe.
Lead curator Giulia Bartrum said: “In a sense it is difficult to do an exhibition about Munch without including it because it is what people expect. Hopefully it will draw people in but they will go away having learned much more about him as an artist.”
She said UK audiences were “much less familiar” with his “beautiful printmaking”, adding: “This exhibition will put Munch into context within the old master tradition and look at the remarkable impact of his prints alongside other leading printmakers of his period. We hope that the show will lift the veil on the deeply personal and emotional artworks of the man behind The Scream.”
Among the works on show are an image of the Madonna complete with a foetus and swimming sperm, which caused controversy when it was first seen, and a self-portrait from 1895.
Ms Bartrum said the show would reveal Munch to be a “man of his times” who travelled between Norway and major artistic centres such as Paris and Berlin.
British Museum director Hartwig Fischer said the exhibition would be “fascinating and challenging”.
He said: “We are honoured that the Munch Museum in Oslo will be sending us one of their biggest international loans of Munch’s prints, which can be seen alongside a number of key Munch works in the British Museum’s collection. Together, this survey of Munch’s pioneering art will allow visitors to see why he is considered one of the greatest artists of all time.”
Edvard Munch: Love And Angst runs from April 11 to July 21 in the Sir Joseph Hotung Exhibition Gallery and is supported by AKO Foundation.
