E
dvard Munch’s masterpiece
The
Scream
can be seen as a depiction of
many things: mankind’s impotence
before nature and history, a
self-destructive rage at our own
insignificance, or plain, old-fashioned existential
angst. It doubtless tells us something about the
human condition that Munch’s lurid portrait of a
hairless goblin freaking out on a mountain road
overlooking the Oslofjord is, if one measures art by
price, one of the half-dozen most valuable paintings
of all time – in May 2012, one of the four versions of
The Scream
Munch created between 1893 and 1910
sold at Sotheby’s in New York for just short of
US$120 million (NOK690m), a world record for an
art auction.
The Scream
can also be imagined to be a
reasonable depiction of the expression on the face of
an art-gallery director who has just noticed a space
on the wall where the first-ever version of
The Scream
had been hanging. At around 11.20am on 22 August
2004,
a pair of masked bandits – at least one of them
armed with a .357 Magnum pistol – walked into Oslo’s
Munch Museum and, to the surprise of several dozen
museum visitors, yanked the painting from its hook
Top
⁄
A bystander snapped
this picture of thieves heading
towards a black Audi with two
paintings: Munch’s
Madonna
and
The Scream
Above
⁄
The version of Munch’s
existentialist masterpiece
The
Scream
stolen from Oslo’s
Munch Museum in 2004
and bolted, pausing en route to also help themselves
to Munch’s rather gentler
Madonna
.
A bystander
on the street outside photographed the robbery in
progress, the waiting getaway driver popping the
black Audi’s hatch to receive one of Norway’s most
prized cultural treasures. It was the last time
The
Scream
would be seen in public for over two years.
“
It was a Sunday,” recalls Petra Pettersen, who
for 16 years has been the curator of paintings at the
Munch Museum, “so I was at home. I heard about
it on the radio. I was shocked, of course, though I
knew the security at the museumwas really not so
good. But then nobody expected something like this
in Norway.”
They should have. Roughly 10 years earlier, a
version of
The Scream
belonging to the National
Gallery in Oslo had been stolen. It was recovered
a fewmonths later in a sting operation involving
Norwegian and British police. (In a touching
demonstration of Scandinavian fair play, the thieves
were later released, after appealing their sentences on
the grounds that the British detectives had entered
Norway using false identities.)
But installing high-tech security systems for
high-profile artworks is expensive and often arguably
redundant. The best protection a painting as well
known as
The Scream
has – at least in theory – may
be its own fame. Though it is worth a fortune, there’s
little point in stealing what can’t be sold – and few
billionaires are willing to risk imprisonment to
purchase a painting they can’t tell anyone they own.
So what’s the point of stealing it? Julian Radcliffe
has had more reason than most to consider the
motivations of art thieves. Since 1991, Radcliffe has
run the Art Loss Register (ALR), a London-based
»
“
Nowhere else do you find
millions of dollars just
hanging on a wall, so the
actual theft is a very low-
risk enterprise”
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