Dali House

Considering the noisemaker of a painting we’re talking about, the Norwegian cops are staying pretty damn quiet about how they managed to get back Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” on August 31, a full two years after it was snatched in broad daylight from the Munch Museum in Oslo.

Hopefully the jumpy Scandinavian press, now that they’re no longer busy doodling cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, can get to the bottom of this mystery within a mystery. Most likely a ransom was paid, but if so, it only deepens the mythology swarming like irked bees around Eddie’s freaky little canvas.

It is, after all, a potent symbol of the frightfulness of our times (and perhaps of Munch’s a century ago), and it was no small irony that Norwegians treated the theft of this national treasure as as terrorist act.

But for now, at least, all the cops are saying is that they recovered “The Scream” and “The Madonna”, seen above, the other Munch painting stolen with it, in better-than-expected condition, a ragged corner and water damage to the former and some small rips and gouges in the latter, all of which can be repaired.

If “The Scream” — or “Skrik” as it’s known in Norway (literally, “yikes!”) – weren’t such an important symbol, this would have been one zany comedy from start to finish.

Two guys (or was it three?) burst into the Munch Museum waving pistols on August 22, 2004, and told everyone to lie on the floor. The witnesses, a bunch of foreigners among them, gave the police various deeply expressionist versions of what happened, resulting in one expert saying it was a professional job and the crooks knew exactly where the two paintings were, and another expert saying they had no idea where the paintings were and the idiots were completely surprised to find them attached to the walls by wire.

“Both” of the thieves were dressed in black, a witness said. “Two of the three robbers”, another said, ran out of the museum, “each carrying a painting”. The “two thieves” were carrying “the painting” between them, still another insisted.

One witness across the street saw them “kicking, wrenching and hitting” the paintings to get them out of their frame, none of which was caught by Unreliable Witness No 51, who just happened to have a camera! His photos were published by Aftenposten (literally, “the mailman’s late again”). He snapped away as they robbers carried the pictures to their Audi, in which “a third man was waiting” with the motor running, the press said.

Police got the call at 11.10am. “Some shaken tourists inside the museum said they thought it took a long time before police were on the scene,” Aftenposten griped. They started searching around, listening for screams, and found (a) the Audi parked at a local tennis club and (b) parts of the picture frames along the roadside. So the pictures were now naked, and Bjorn Borg may have been involved; yes, he’s Swedish, but he’s not a wealthy man anymore, so close enough.

Norway got a little hysterical. Schoolkids, who are breastfed on Munch there, were afraid to venture outside the classroom. Stealing a work of art so thoroughly identified with the nation was, after all, like abducting a child. Who would kidnap their beloved little howler?

The museum offered a reward: two million kroner, which sounds like a lot until you translate it into US$307,000. The offer, investigators said to no one’s surprise, had “little impact”. The only tips that came in were from psychics, who suggested checking a farm outside Detroit, but that turned out to be where Jimmy Hoffa was buried.

Eight months later, though, the cops found something else: a suspect. This coincided with a “rumour” that the thieves had by then already burned their booty. One thing led to another, as things often do in criminal investigations, and in early 2006, six ex-cons were tried for either planning or committing the heist. Three copped four-to-eight in the slammer, and two of them had to come up with 750 million kroner to soothe feathers at City Hall.

The biggest twist in the tale took the form of a possible link between the Munch affair and one of Norway’s biggest robberies, the April 2004 Norwegian Cash Services caper, in which a police officer was killed. Last month the cops said they were closing in on those robbers, having spent 65 million kroner on the hunt, which is about what was stolen in the first place.

Investigators figure the same gang, or a close cousin, swiped the Munchs as a diversion, reckoning that the cops would have to sink a bucket of time and money into the painting search, which they did of course.

Just how much cash on the barrel are we talking about with these paintings anyway? Well, you get into the “priceless” anti-gravity field here, but the guesstimates are $22.4 million for “Madonna” and between $37 million and $52 million for “The Scream”.

Meanwhile, the Munch Museum was closed for 10 months for a $6-million security overhaul. The populist Progress Party (which doesn’t seem destined to make much progress politically) said, hey, if these pictures are so easy to steal, why don’t we just rent them out to whoever wants them? The corporations that lease them would probably have better security. Yeah, but the first people asking to rent them would be the crooks, it was pointed out.

Security was indeed a bit lax at the museum. Outdated equipment chugged and whirred furiously and largely in vain as the front-door camera sat unhooked and most of the others were pointed down the blouses of female art patrons.

Now security at the new-and-improved gallery is so uptight that a local paper called it “Fortress Munch”. The airport-style metal detectors and X-ray machines at the entrance put the Munch heist right up there with al-Qaeda’s plotting.

And then there’s the deja vu factor. Wasn’t “Skrik” stolen once before? Yes, but not the same “Skrik”. This is the one that was stolen this time, with the earlier target inset. (Well, photos of them.)

Fortunately Munch knew what a horrible place the world was becoming and made numerous copies of his paintings as insurance against this precise possibility.

He painted “The Scream” twice, did a pair of pastels and ran off more than 100 lithographs.

It’s been said there are around 105 versions.

He may have been anticipating Warhol, who churned out silkscreens of it in 1983. Then in 1991 American muralist Robert Fishbone made a fortune selling four-foot inflateable Scream dolls for $30 a pop.

People could float their anxieties away; certainly Fishbone did.

The little bugger turned up on keyrings and mousepads, on a “Bush Again?” toilet roll, as the mask in the “Scream” movies and as Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone”. The painting has made several appearances on “The Simpsons” as well.

And refusing to be forgotten is my wife Ae’s rendition, which prognosticated the actual appearance of one of the bad guys.

On February 12, 1994, the first day of the Lillehammer Olympics, “The Scream” Mark I was yanked off the wall of the National Gallery in Oslo by a pair of ambitious, sarcastic types who scaled a ladder and broke in through a window before opening time. They left a note saying, “Thanks for the bad security.” It took them 50 seconds.

At least the security camera was working. British detectives tracked the crooks down by May. Three Norwegians were busted for attempting a million-dollar ransom.

Norway, which doesn’t get a lot of any type of crime, was suddenly seeing all of Munch’s work being swiped – “Vampire” from the Munch museum in 1990, then a portrait study from the National Art Museum, then “Blue Dress” from a country hotel. A whole lot of screaming was going on, of the blue murder variety.

You can almost hear Eddie wheezing for breath.

Munch was so sick when he was born on December 12, 1863, that they baptised him as soon as they saw him. He lost his mum when he was five and his Bible-thumping dad can in no way be accused of spoiling his seven kids.

Predictably, Edvard became a Bohemian. He started painting at 17 in Christiania, as Oslo used to be called, and carried on in Paris, crossing impressionism and post-impressionism to get to the other side, where he found himself alone, style-wise.

As a symbolist, nobody got him; the traumas of life he poured onto canvas went over like a lead balloon. Melancholy prevailed nevertheless until 1908, when a nervous breakdown landed him in a Copenhagen clinic that cheerfully dispensed shock treatment. He came out smiling. The sun came out in his paintings.

Munch never married and was one of those old geezers who says the things he makes are his children. At fatherhood he was gung-ho, producing 1,008 paintings, 15,391 prints, 4,443 drawings and watercolours and six sculptures by the time pneumonia laid him low on January 23, 1944. He still owned 4,000 of his own artworks when he died, and they all went to the City of Oslo, which turned out to be one half-assed step-father.

“I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

Thus Munch described the origin of “The Scream” in 1893, the same year Freud published his first paper on hysteria. It was on the Ekeberg hill above Christiania’s harbour. He may have just visited his sister Laura, confined to a mental hospital there with manic depression. Some family!

He titled the painting in German: “Der Schrei der Natur” – “The Scream of Nature”. At some point someone, maybe Edvard himself, wrote across the top of the picture, “This could only have been painted by a madman.”

Is it Munch doing the screaming? A lot of people think that’s him in the picture, but it’s evident he’s not doing the screaming. Covering his ears, he’s reacting to nature’s howl of rage. You can understand the shape of the torso better when you realise he’s actually shrinking from the noise, pulling in, not leaning out.

In 1978, Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum hypothesised that Munch must have seen the Peruvian mummy displayed at the 1889 Paris World Fair, crouching in a fetal position with its hands against its face. His buddy Paul Gauguin copied it into “Human Misery (Grape Harvest at Arles)” (detail here) and “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” – the old, despairing woman on the left (detail below). There’s another mummy in Florence’s Museum of Natural History that supposedly bears an even more striking resemblance to the Screamer.

Then there was the revelation in 2003 that Krakatoa’s 1893 eruption of may well have painted Munch’s sky for him, as it did for all Europe that winter. Part of Nature’s scream.

Hmmmmmm. Art theft – what’s in it for me?

According to an Associated Press article this month, law-enforcement agencies have in their pocket a list of 170,000 to 200,000 “important” pieces of art that’ve been grabbed from private homes and museums in recent years. Interpol figures about 10% of this stuff will be recovered.

The only thing cops have going for them is that the famous items are a bugger to unload once swiped. The Italian house painter who stole Mona Lisa in 1911 sat on it for two years, waiting, waiting, then as soon as he tried to sell it, clang went the jail cell door.

So, remember: “Trophy art robberies” get you nowhere. Stick to the small stuff.

Well, that’s what the cops would say, isn’t it? In February, gunmen scarpered with a Picasso, a Monet, a Matisse and a Dali from a Rio de Janeiro museum during carnival. Not caught yet.
On St Patrick’s Day 1990, two men disguised as Boston bobbies talked the guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum into unlocking the doors and made off with works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet. Not caught yet.
No 1 on the FBI’s Top 10 art thefts: the looting of Iraqi artefacts following the US invasion in 2003. You won’t be seeing those ancient bits again anytime soon.

One guy who did get caught was the French waiter who admitted a few years back stealing 239 pieces worth up to $20 million from small provincial museums. Unfortunately his mom was on his side. She chopped up a lot of the paintings and chucked ‘em in a canal.

Go ahead and scream.

UPDATE May 21, 2008: For the Dali House record, “The Scream” and “The Madonna” were this week finally replaced on the walls of Oslo’s Munch Museum. It was three years since the robbery and two years since their recovery, but the restoration experts had a lot of work to do.

“The Scream” is back on view complete with a humidity stain of unknown origin in the lower left corner, which the city’s art-conservation department dares not touch for fear of making it worse. “The Madonna” is displaying an open wound, probably inflicted when the thieves tore the canvases from their frames in case their were tracking devices built in. It is to undergo further restoration.

Interestingly, the restoration process uncovered evidence that, together with written sources, indicate “The Scream” was painted in 1910, not 1893.