On the morning of 12 February 1994, while the world's cameras pointed at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, two men propped a ladder against Norway's National Gallery in Oslo, smashed a window, and were gone in under a minute with Edvard Munch's The Scream. They left the ladder, some wire-cutters, and a postcard-sized note that translated as: “Thanks for the poor security.” The alarm was dismissed at first as a fault. Norway's most famous artwork had been guarded, on its nation's proudest morning, by a pane of ordinary glass and good intentions. The thieves later demanded a ransom of a million dollars; the Norwegian government refused to pay a krone.
The recovery was as cinematic as the theft. Norwegian police worked with Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad, whose detective Charley Hill posed as a representative of the Getty Museum offering a ransom-purchase. In May 1994 the sting led to a house in Åsgårdstrand, the seaside town where Munch had summered, and the painting came back essentially unharmed. Convictions followed — including of Pål Enger, a former professional footballer turned art thief who had stolen a Munch before — though several were later overturned on the technicality that the undercover officers had entered Norway under false identities. The note-writers had made their point about security either way.
The second theft
A decade later, the lesson still hadn't fully landed. On 22 August 2004, in broad daylight and in front of terrified visitors, armed men in balaclavas walked into the Munch Museum across town, tore The Scream and Madonna from the walls, threatened staff at gunpoint, and drove off. This was a different version — Munch made several — and it stayed missing for two years while rumours had it burned or dumped. Investigators came to believe the raid was connected to the milieu behind the NOKAS cash-depot robbery, Norway's biggest, possibly as a police-distracting sideshow. Both paintings were recovered in August 2006, The Scream with moisture damage to one corner that conservators decided to stabilise but not fully repaint. The Munch Museum reopened with metal detectors and bolted, glassed-in pictures — the era of trusting Oslo was over.
Which Scream, then, is “the” Scream? Munch produced four principal versions of the composition between 1893 and about 1910 — two paintings and two pastels — plus an 1895 lithograph whose prints spread the image worldwide. The picture belongs to his sprawling life's project, the Frieze of Life, a cycle on love, anxiety and death; Munch himself hoarded his art obsessively and bequeathed the contents of his studio — over a thousand paintings — to the city of Oslo, which opened the Munch Museum in 1963. The 1893 painting belongs to the National Museum in Oslo (the 1994 victim); the Munch Museum holds a pastel and the circa-1910 painting (the 2004 victim). The 1895 pastel, the only version then in private hands, sold at Sotheby's New York in May 2012 for $119.9 million after twelve minutes of bidding — at the time the highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction; the buyer was later revealed as the American financier Leon Black.
What the figure is actually doing
Quiz setters love the painting's misread details. The waxy figure on the bridge is not screaming: Munch's own account describes walking at sunset above Oslo when the sky turned blood-red and he sensed “an infinite scream passing through nature” — the figure clamps its hands over its ears to shut the scream out. Theories about that lurid sky range from ordinary Nordic sunsets to atmospheric dust from the 1883 Krakatoa eruption to rare nacreous clouds; none is settled. Munch placed the memory on a path over Ekeberg hill, looking down on what was then called Kristiania. The Norwegian title is simply Skrik. And in 2021 the National Museum confirmed a century-old whodunit: a tiny pencil inscription on the 1893 painting — “Could only have been painted by a madman” — was written by Munch himself, most likely in response to a critic who questioned his sanity. Stolen twice, priced in nine figures, copied onto mugs and emoji, The Scream endures as modern anxiety's official portrait — a picture of one person hearing what the rest of us pretend not to.
Quiz nuggets
- The Scream was stolen from Oslo's National Gallery on 12 February 1994, the opening day of the Lillehammer Olympics; thieves left a note thanking the museum for poor security.
- Undercover detective Charley Hill helped recover it in May 1994 by posing as a Getty Museum agent.
- In August 2004 armed robbers took another version, plus Madonna, from the Munch Museum; both were recovered in 2006.
- Munch made four main versions plus a lithograph; the 1895 pastel sold for $119.9 million at Sotheby's in 2012.
- The figure is not screaming but blocking its ears against a “scream passing through nature”; the Norwegian title is Skrik.