The Scream

0:01 Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alastair Souk. And I'm James Fox. A pale-skinned, wide-eyed figure, with a head shaped a little like an inverted pear, claps his hands upon both cheeks, mouth agape. Is he screaming? We can't be sure. But we can see he's shocked about something... Maybe he's just had an epiphany about the brutal horror of existence in this godforsaken universe.

0:29 Or maybe, just maybe, James, he slapped on some aftershave for the first time and had no idea how much it was going to sting. Because this week, I thought I'd open with a description not of a work of art, but of a film poster. for the beloved 1990 American comedy Home Alone, starring Macaulay Culkin as eight-year-old Kevin McAllister, who was accidentally left behind by his family over the Christmas holidays, as we all know, and has to fend for himself and fend off a couple of burglars.

0:57 And I think that poster, I reckon all of our listeners pretty much will be able to picture it immediately because it's so famous. And in it, of course, Culkin is adopting the pose that I've just described. And it happens, just so happens, that the poster is a homage to a very famous work of art that's going to be the focus of our discussion today.

1:19 I'm so pleased you started with that film. And you're right, yeah, in the film itself, the only reason he's screaming, the only reason he's holding his hands is because he slapped on some very stinging aftershave. But the poster is drawing very consciously on a painting that was made almost exactly a century earlier on the other side of the Atlantic in Europe.

1:38 And it is, of course, Edvard Munch's The Scream. which, do you think, one of the most famous artworks in history? I think there is a very strong case, isn't there, that it is the second most famous work of art. The second most. OK. After, well, you know, you have to realise, I mean, the great marker of its celebrity is that there is an emoji of Edvard Munch's The Scream, and there are really not many works of art that have their own emojis.

2:06 One of them is The Great Wave. We've already done it. Which we've done. Yeah. And, of course, another one. I think... I don't know if there is a Mona Lisa emoji. Funnily enough, well, first of all, it's not just one image. We'll get into that. It's slightly complicated, but there's more than one. It's a motif.

2:39 Yes. And secondly, it wasn't really as famous as it is now in Munch's lifetime, the Norwegian artist who created it, Edvard Munch. I'm interested in the comparison with the Mona Lisa because they are kind of polar opposites, aren't they? The Mona Lisa is this image of... implacable calm and beauty and peacefulness.

2:59 And the scream is this image of horror and terror and anxiety. Actually, the scream's almost like the Mona Lisa with the mask ripped off. It's almost like the picture of Dorian Gray for Mona Lisa or humanity itself, actually. And you're right, it's a complete cult image. And when I was a teenager, I had a post of the scream on my wall.

3:17 Did you? I had an inflatable scream. I had 15 reasons why beer is better than a woman, which is just an indictment of my upbringing compared to yours. The other thing I had for an art project, I made a clay model of the Scream that was a candle holder. So you could slip the tea light into the mouth and you could create all these ghostly shadows.

3:37 It is the perfect Halloween mask. It really is. But that model that I made is still to this day on my bedside table in my childhood bedroom. And every time I take my children round to the house, they refuse to look at it because they find it so scary. I can imagine. I mean, it was used famously, wasn't it, as the sort of mask and the poster and the publicity for, who is it?

3:57 Wes Craven. The Scream horror franchise of the 90s and early 2000s. Um, it's been ripped off, caricatured. It's been in all sorts of, I mean, we'll, we'll talk about some of the strange souvenirs and merchandise later on. Um, but it is a fascinating phenomenon, the way that it has gone viral. And I, I know that we're going to attempt to get to the bottom of why that might have happened.

4:21 But in some sense, it's kind of a mystery. It has just the most incredible afterlife. And it goes on this strange serpentine journey towards and into the public imagination. And that's what we're going to try and do in this episode. We're going to talk about the genesis of the Scream. We're going to talk about the images themselves.

4:40 And we're going to talk about how they became so famous. And became this kind of, what is it, universal symbol of anxiety and dread and despair, beloved of angsty adolescents, including when you were a teenager, James, the world over, I think. Indeed. So this is the story of Edvard Munch's The Scream.

5:05 So Alistair, can you tell us a little bit about Edvard Munch's backstory? Yeah, I think we should get to know Edvard Munch a little better before we discuss The Scream, right? So he's a very famous Scandinavian artist, probably the most famous Norwegian artist. Born in 1863, he dies in the middle of the 20th century, 1944.

5:23 And he's classically seen as, in many ways, a precursor of modern art, isn't he? He's sort of... anticipates this movement known as expressionism. He becomes very interested in symbolism at the end of the 19th century. And works like The Scream are these hinge pieces that then anticipate things that come later.

5:43 And he is someone who, towards the end of his life, he was quite good at tending his own myth and creating his sort of self-image. Like many of the best artists. Like, indeed. They suddenly have one eye on immortality and they want to ensure that that story is told as they want to tell it. And there is this really famous quote that I thought would be nice to begin with.

6:06 Forgive me if it's too obvious, but this is around about, I think it's just after his 70th birthday. He's looking back. He describes his life and he says, I was born dying. Sickness, insanity and death. Were the dark angels standing guard at my cradle and they followed me throughout my life. And he really had, I'm sure you're familiar with that, he had this sense that his family was totally cursed.

6:31 Yeah. And in many ways it does feel like it was. I mean it was a very unhappy, traumatic opening for him, right? Terrible life. I mean, it's so Scandinoise. He's born in the middle of winter in Norway on the 12th of December. The weather is so bad. The snow is so deep. It's so cold that they can't even take him to the church to christen him for another four months.

6:54 And do you know his father? His father is a really... He's a odd man, isn't he? He's a tragic figure. His father is a doctor who's squeamish. I mean, he faints at the sight of blood. He's religious, but he's also obsessed with ghosts and monsters. He's terrified of everything. Do you know what his father does?

7:09 On the day his son, Edvard, is born, he goes to his Bible and he writes in the Bible. He said, my son, Edvard, was born today. I hope he dies well. Oh, my. I mean, if you're thinking on the day your child is born of their death. Born astride a grave. Well, exactly. What chance do you stand? And indeed, he didn't stand a chance.

7:27 I've got another quote. This is what Edvard Munch said about his father. He says, my father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious to the point of psychoneurosis. From him, I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

7:45 They followed me when I played, followed me everywhere, followed me in the spring sun and the glory of summer. They stood by my bedside when I shut my eyes, threatening me with death, hell and eternal damnation. Often I awoke in the middle of the night, gazing around the room in wild fear. Was I in hell?

8:01 I mean, you'd think he's laying on a bit thick, but then you sort of read about what did happen to him when he was a child. I mean, he's the second of five children born to this military doctor, as you say, Christian Munk, and his mother, Laura. And I think he's five, right, when his mother, who I think is weakened after giving birth to that fifth child, she dies of tuberculosis.

8:24 I think the whole family, they have a lot... They sort of run in their family these respiratory problems, lung conditions... So she dies when he's five. There's also then he's subsequently very close to a sister called Sophie. Yes. And then a few years later, I forget exactly how many, but she also dies.

8:41 When he's 14. So he's a teenager. He himself has this kind of close near-death experience where during his childhood and teenage years, he suffers a kind of near-fatal illness and that's a terrible moment. His brother dies of pneumonia later. Right. I think there's a grandfather who dies of TB. And the ones who don't die of TB are in psychiatric hospitals with mental health issues.

9:03 Well, he's going to go on and have, I mean, not a kind of balanced life. I mean, he's someone who suffers from addiction, alcohol, great deal of anxiety, depression. He does end up in clinics. He calls them nerve clinics, sanatoriums. He has these very fraught, difficult... relationships with women, one of which ends with him getting part of his hand blown off.

9:25 So the story goes, I think you do see a correlation between the sense of darkness within his own sort of foundation and his own life story and then the darkness in his own. work. Yes. And which is such a prominent part of it. And I think, I mean, look, we should probably skip through the story a bit.

9:46 So the family is quite poor there. He grows up in what was called Christiania and is now, of course, Oslo. So for a long time, this had been called Christiania and then Norwegian independence in the 20th century changes the city changes its name to Oslo. And although they come from somewhere this phrase, cultural aristocracy, which I guess means what they're sort of historically upper middle class, but economically really quite poor.

10:11 So they're living in working class conditions, perhaps as a result, suffering working class illnesses, essentially, you know, things like TB. And I think the father is, as you've very dramatically described, very difficult man, this fundamental Christian. So it sounds like it's a very odd relationship.

10:31 set up at home. Yes. The dad wants him not to become an artist, I think, and Edvard Munch does study engineering briefly, but in the 1880s, he ends up at art school. Yes. And he gets in with this new crowd of people, right? There's this kind of moment. It's called the Christiania Bohemians, this set.

10:49 One of the big things is it's a great reaction against, I suppose, organised religion, Christianity, but also the strictures, the conventions of bourgeois society. And certainly when I've read about Munch, I've always sort of assumed that there's this moment of in his youth, he's falling in with this crowd where it's a sense of the freedom and excitement, which is an alternative to the strictness that he's had when he was much younger.

11:13 And this is the moment where he's starting to make his first works of art. But interestingly, the works that are sort of being privileged by that group at the time, they're not necessarily the things that we would associate Munch with. No. Which come from the following decade, the 1890s, which is when the Scream motif was created.

11:31 So initially, he's much more into this thing called naturalism. Yes. His sort of first, his sort of true debut, if you like, is this painting, Morning, which dates from when? I think 1884. 1884. It's actually a lovely picture, isn't it? Isn't it? I mean, if you have a look at it, it is something which, I mean, you wouldn't, if you didn't know, you know, your art history, you wouldn't sort of look at this and go, this is Munch.

11:53 It's a woman. She's sitting on a bed and she's semi-undressed, but there's nothing really eroticising about the image as I see it. There's loads of light streaming in from a window and she's looking out and seems quite peaceful and calm. And it's possible she's a serving girl. You know, I think that maybe one of the original titles was going to be Servant Girl.

12:13 And so there's a sense of a humble, ordinary working class woman with this slightly unbuttoned top and one barefoot. And the realism of the scene is interesting to Munch, but also a sense of... quite dazzling light effects and a painterly brushstroke thing that he's maybe taking from having seen reproductions of French paintings which have been happening in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s.

12:37 Yes, a lovely semi-impressionist kind of picture, isn't it? That feels actually very Scandinavian because it's a very pale colour palette. There is nothing in this picture, I would say, that would suggest what Munch was going to become later on. When does he begin to change? When does he begin to turn a corner artistically, do you think?

12:59 Well, I think at this moment in the 1880s, this is the moment where he falls in with the Christiania bohemians. And his next sort of big picture is called The Sick Child. And clearly it's drawing upon his own experiences or thinking back to, you know, the death of his sister. And when it gets shown, it causes a great controversy.

13:19 And I think that's quite stinging for him. He spends, I think it's 1886, he spends the entire year working and reworking this picture. And it becomes very, very thick with these great kind of coagulations of paint, which he then scratches into. And it's quite, I suppose, in terms of technique, quite out there, particularly in Norway.

13:41 And there are quite a lot of negative reviews, not exclusively, but also in the same way. But towards the end of the 1880s, he then retreats a bit from that more extreme avant-gardism in the context of his own life. And right at the end of the decade, he has a real turning point. This is what I think.

14:01 I don't know about you, but it's 1889. Yeah, this is a big year for him. This is a really big year because he starts to... The spring, he has a one-man show. So I think he mounts it himself, right? So this is unprecedented in Norway. But he's showing there pictures which are perhaps less controversial than The Sick Child.

14:20 And out of this, he wins a grant to go and study in Paris. And he ends up in Paris at the end. I think it's autumn, isn't it? 1889. And it feels like this is a really critical moment in terms of his development, don't you think? Yeah, he's he's he's being taught by the French artist Léon Bonin. But in many ways, the real legacy of Paris was this is where he gets to see the work of Bonin.

14:46 what we today call the post-impressionist, although they weren't known as post-impressionists back then, he gets to see the work of Vincent van Gogh, who's a quite similar figure in some ways. He gets to see the work of Paul Gauguin. He gets to see the work of the symbolists. And this is when he begins to think, you know what, if I sort of amplify my use of colour, if I exaggerate my brushstrokes, I can start to make these pictures express these very deep, very deeply felt emotional urges.

15:11 So that, I think, is the moment that he begins to become the artist we recognise, the artist of the Scream. And there is this other sort of detail that I love about Paris. And I don't know if you've come across this, but when he's there, he, as well as staying abreast of developments in contemporary painting, as you've described, he goes to the World's Fair, which is being held in 1889.

15:32 And one of the exhibits that he encounters in Paris in that year is a Peruvian mummy. Ah, right. And the Peruvian mummy that he encounters in Paris is essentially a skeletal figure with its hands up by its... cheeks. In true Kevin McAllister mode. Exactly. Proto McAllister. And there are art historians, and I have to say, I'm very sympathetic to this idea, who notice this, look at that kind of visual correspondence with the famous image that he produces just a few years later of the scream itself, and think maybe could there be an echo there?

16:13 Yeah. I don't know. Do you think that's too literal, too specific? I think it's fair. When you see the images side by side, and we may well be able to show our viewers these images side by side, it is very compelling. It's very, it's uncanny. The other thing that happens while he's in Paris in 1889 is his father dies right at the end of the year.

16:31 This is a terrible blow because they're poor anyway, but they are, the whole family is dependent on his meagre salary. He writes, Munk, he says, at its worst, I lean my head against the fireplace, overwhelmed with the sudden urge, kill yourself. And then it's all over. Why live? So he's really despairing at this point.

16:50 In 1892, another big turning point for him, in 1892, he goes to Berlin. Well, Berlin is a really fascinating moment, isn't it? Yeah. October 1892. While he's in Berlin, he gets to know August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright. They get to know each other very well. They spend a lot of time in this beer cellar called the Black Piglet.

17:12 I mean, a legendary place. A legendary place where they drink copious amounts. Apparently, they have 900 brands of alcohol there. which Munch and Strindberg work their way through. But the reason Munch goes to Berlin is he has been invited to stage a one-man show at the Union of Berlin Artists. Right.

17:30 This is quite an honour. They've never staged a one-man show before. And on the 5th of November, 1892, the show opens and it is an absolute disaster. Can I read a review? I always like to read a review because critics always get it right. Of course. This is what one critic wrote. Art is in danger. All true believers raise a great lament.

17:52 Call forth the rescue squads to battle against that Nordic dauber and poisoner of art. Edvard Munch, an impressionist and a mad one at that, has broken into our herd of fine, solidly bourgeois artists. An absolutely demented character. Wow. I hadn't come across that review. I tell you, that is so interesting because it's going for the cliché of the artist who is seen as being avant-garde, experimental, radical, being quite mad and demented.

18:21 And just hold that thought because it's something which we might come on to later. But early on... A year or so before he makes the scream, he's being accused of being a man. He absolutely is. And so it's a real hoo-ha, actually. It becomes known as the Munk Affair. It becomes known as the Munk Affair.

18:39 What actually happens is there are all kinds of speeches going back and forth. I think even the Kaiser... sticks his oar in. Oh, really? And in the end, after six days, the Union of Berlin Artists decide to close the exhibition. There is then a massive fight between the modernist artists or the progressive artists and the more reactionary figures within the Union.

18:57 And Munch is uncharacteristically delighted by this. Well, I think he recognises that it's a hell of a lot of free publicity. Yeah. And it's sort of making his name, establishing an international, you know, he's not in Norway, he's in Berlin, international reputation. Do you have a sense of what the artists, that association of Berlin artists who took exception to his paintings, do you have a sense of what they objected to?

19:23 I don't know exactly what they objected to. And even actually the figures who supported him were not really supporting his work. They were just saying we shouldn't have political interference in these exhibitions. We should be able to run our own exhibitions. I mean, because I wonder whether there's a sort of something about maybe a sense of unfinished that could have been part of that kind of radical, as they perceived it, side of the painting.

19:46 but also this sense of foregrounding personal experience, because we've already been reading a lot of his notes and jottings where he's talking in very grand, dark terms about his own life. And I think one of the sort of tenets, if you like, of that group of bohemians back in Christiania I think one of their tenets was you can really mine and utilise and draw on personal experience.

20:14 And I think it's quite interesting to think about Edvard Munch. That's maybe one of the big ideas of him as an artist and what he's contributing to art history is that he did have all of these really quite traumatic events that shaped him. And he draws upon them. Yes. And sometimes in quite an overboiled, overheated, possibly slightly adolescent way, he turns them into something which has universal resonance.

20:37 Yes. Which is arguably what he's sort of doing at this moment. Because he stays in Berlin. He subsequently has a lot of German patrons. You know, he's making his name there, and that's establishing a market for his work in Germany. And this is the moment in the 1890s where he starts to come up with this idea of a great cycle of paintings.

20:58 Slightly complicated idea, but... I've never fully understood it, so I'm hoping you integrate it to me. I've desperately been reading up on this ahead of coming here, James, and I'm not sure I've quite cracked it, but essentially it's called The Freeze of Life. Yes. It's this kind of vast, ambitious cycle of pictures which are thematically loosely linked, and Munch sees them as touching on what?

21:21 You know, great fundamentals of human existence, character, things like love and angst and death. And these are some of the most famous paintings that he really makes, even now. They're works that we, you know, titles like Madonna, people might know. There's The Vampire. Yes. There's also The Scream.

21:40 There's one work which I find very interesting, which is called Evening on Karl Johann. It dates from 1892 and it depicts not a street scene at night in Berlin, but actually the main avenue in Christiania. You know, we were describing that work before morning, which is sort of dazzling morning sunlight.

22:00 And then suddenly with a work, this work evening on Karl Johan, it's nighttime, it's evening, it's moonlight, it's gaslighting, it's street lighting. You can see glowing lights coming through windows. And there's on the right side, a single figure with his back to us, who's disappearing down this kind of thoroughfare that's going on this big diagonal towards the centre in the middle distance.

22:24 Yeah. Again, compositionally, hold that in mind. But then on the left, the main focus of the picture is this great press, this kind of throng of people in top hats and dark clothes. And some of them, several of them, the ones who are closest to us, the viewer, they have these really weird, pale, deathly, skull-like, ghostly faces.

22:46 which they look like sort of zombies or undead. You can see why in the future directors of horror film franchises might be drawn to Edvard Munch's work. And that frontality is also quite interesting. I mean, you know, I haven't really described it in significant depth. If you get to see or Google Evening on Karl Johan, you will see, I think, the beginnings of what then subsequently becomes the scream, even though it's not directly linked, don't you think?

23:15 Absolutely. Well, shall we get to the incident, if you like, that spurred the scream? So it's around 1892. Munch is, what, at this stage, what, 29, 30 years old? And he writes an extremely famous account when later he describes this particular experience. And he says, I shall read it. He said, I went along the road with two friends.

23:38 The sun set. Suddenly the sky became blood and I felt the breath of sadness. I stopped, leaned against the fence, deathly tired. Clouds over the fjord dripped, reeking blood. My friends went on, but I just stood trembling with an open wound in my breast. I heard a huge, extraordinary scream. pass through nature.

24:02 So that's the origin story. And actually, you know, I think it's worth clarifying at this point, kind of what we're talking about with the scream, because what you have just quoted is such an integral part of what the scream in the kind of wider sense is, because variations of that text sometimes even appear on some of the images of the scream itself.

24:23 So, you know, common misconception about the Scream might be that there is just a single artwork, which we can think of as the Scream that was the source of that emoji that we might use on WhatsApp, whatever. But of course, there are several versions of the Scream. There's a pastel version in 1893. There's a painted version, probably the best-known version, also from 1893, which is now in the National Museum in Oslo.

24:49 There's a second painting, some debate over the date of it, but conventionally it's dated a little bit later, 1910. Yes. That's in the Munch Museum in Oslo as well. And... There's another pastel, another drawing. So one of the drawings is, I think, actually predominantly crayon. The other is pastel. The pastel one is the one that in 2012 sold for a huge amount of money.

25:13 I can't remember. What was it? Almost $120 million? $120 million. And, of course, there's the print. and maybe around 30 of these lithographs, black and white lithographs. What I was going to say is that that text you've described, in a sense, that's also another facet of the Scream. So you've got two paintings, two drawings, a whole load of prints, some of which are individually hand-coloured.

25:37 You've got this kind of prose poem, the thing you've read out, which sometimes is attached to the pictures themselves. And I know we are maybe leaping right in, but since we're here, I have a theory, which is that there is a sense with the screen that it is all about replication and multiplicity from the off.

25:55 You know, it is this kind of fragmented proliferation of images. And maybe that partly accounts for why in the following century it is... it proliferates the way it does in popular culture. I don't know. Can we talk a little bit about the incident itself? We talked before about the mental and physical health issues that really cursed the Munch family.

26:20 But shortly after his father died in 1889, one of Munch's sisters... had a nervous breakdown and ended up being diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a psychiatric hospital in an area east of Oslo called Eckeberg. Ah, okay. And some people, including Sue Prudeau, who's authored this biography, have claimed that Munch had gone out to Eckeberg at some point in the early 1890s to visit her.

26:46 And then it was as he was walking back to Oslo. from the psychiatric hospital along this pathway, which is often confused in the image as a bridge, but it's not actually a bridge. Right. That that was the genesis of that image. And the point that Sue Pridome makes, which I think is so fascinating, is that that area by that pathway was not only the location for a psychiatric hospital, it was also the location for a slaughterhouse.

27:11 And that it's possible that when he was out there, he heard not only the patients in the hospital screaming, but he also heard the animals as they were being slaughtered screaming. And so it might actually, the genesis might have been a very real set of screams. And, you know, I'm just thinking about this.

27:28 I feel like a complete idiot. I've looked at this picture for many years, and I've always wondered, why is he holding his hands to the side of his face? Yeah. He might just be covering his ears. Yeah, he's not screaming. That's the thing. No, he's hearing the scream, and he's covering his ears to protect himself against this incredibly overwhelming experience.

27:46 What? I hadn't heard that theory and it's totally fascinating, but I think it's partly fascinating to me because it signals how subsequent generations often can project onto the screen what they like. And so at a time where perhaps there's much greater sensitivity about animal rights and a greater interest in the idea that we should perhaps not be slaughtering animals the way we do just to eat them...

28:14 that would totally resonate as a theory. It feels quite now, although historically it sounds like it's substantiated and fascinating. I suppose I also have an inherent scepticism slightly with the kind of literalness. It feels almost too pat. There's another theory, isn't there, where there was the eruption of the great volcano Krakatoa.

28:37 Oh, that's nonsense, that theory. That's 1883, and that supposedly there were lots of kind of colourful sunsets for a few months afterwards around the world, and maybe he has a memory of that. Why would he do it 10 years later? And also, let's remember, he is, you know, after seeing the work of Van Gogh, after seeing the work of Gauguin, he's playing with expressive use of colour.

28:55 The idea that it's because of Krakatoa 10 years earlier, to me, it's nonsense. But it's a picture that does stimulate so much kind of fascinating debate. There is another painting which is very similar and is seen as a precursor, and I think it's a good compare and contrast. It's called Sick Mood at Sunset, Despair, 1882.

29:13 It's essentially the same composition. You know, this, what I thought was a bridge, but this kind of provontory overlooking the fjord, sky above, simple kind of arrangement of the composition, and in the foreground, a figure. But the figure is so different, because the figure in Sick Mood at Sunset Despair is recognisably a man, someone who is not facing, I think is actually leaning perhaps on some sort of parapet, maybe looking out into the landscape to one side.

29:43 As he says in the description, he says he leaned over the railing. So it's clearly all part of this same kind of world, this nexus of imagery that he's exploring, experimenting. But something happens between 1892, when that's painted, and 1893, when he creates the first of the Scream images. And there is this...

30:04 Another sort of, again, it's a biographical theory, but there's this idea that the suicide of a close friend, which takes place at around that moment, may have transformed the way that Munch is approaching this image because this friend kills themselves and suddenly the figure, the prominent figure in this motif that he's come up with, turns into this odd image androgynous, you know, male, female, I don't know, alive, dead?

30:35 Is this a human? Is it a skull? I mean, yeah. Obviously, there are multiple versions. Shall we describe the one in the National Gallery of Norway, which is the first one he paints in oil and tempera with a bit of pastel as well on cardboard? And it's probably the most celebrated of the depictions. I'm sure many, many of our listeners can picture this in their minds without needing this description.

30:59 You have this swirling landscape with a fjord in the distance and a couple of boats on the water. There is this red and yellow and orange and green sunset sky. It always reminds me that a little bit of Jupiter, the planet. It's suddenly come very close to Earth and is kind of about to crush our planet altogether.

31:23 And the defining feature of the composition, which is one that Munch used in a number of other pictures around this time, including the evening at Karl Johan, is this very dramatic diagonal pathway with the railing. You can see two figures in the background, which actually, again, relates to his... The two friends?

31:40 His account, the two friends disappearing without him. And in the foreground, sort of in the middle but not quite in the middle, we have this very strange, ghoulish, swirling, ghost-like, skeletal figure who is holding his hands to his face, I now think to his ear. opening his mouth and well, probably not screaming but looking extremely distressed.

32:02 Shocked. And one of the interesting things is you have this contrast between that pathway with that railing which is very very linear and the two friends who are sort of disappearing off in the background who are very upright and themselves quite linear and there's a sense that maybe that's as close as we're going to get to a more humdrum, rational, everyday reality.

32:24 And then the figure whose body curves like this kind of grub or worm or some sort of larvae and seems like this kind of monstrous caterpillar. And all of the waves and strangeness of the background with the sky and the landscape, it's linking... the figure in the foreground with that background. So there's this sense of the extremity of emotion and psychology, which is an emanation of the figure.

32:54 So that background view feels like very clearly we just... Everyone gets this. You don't need to be an art historian to understand this. You are looking at an image where... And this is what expressionism was about to become... You know, it is an emanation of distress in the way much of that picture has been painted.

33:13 Can I say something? I don't think it's very good. OK. You know, Edvard Munch is a famously uneven artist. Yes. I mean, he's probably the most uneven of great artists. Very, very productive. Worked very, very quickly. And at his best, you know, there's the wonderful self-portrait. There are some wonderful scenes set at Moonlight.

33:35 He is incredible. And at his worst... It's embarrassing. And I think this is close to embarrassing, actually. I used to love it as a teenager. I've gone on a journey. I now think this is a pretty poor work of art. I think it's also just so melodramatic. It is melodramatic. It's so over the top. I will grant you.

33:54 I do not like, I mean, this strange skull-like form is so alienating and so weird. It doesn't make any sense. If what Munch is trying to do is to describe this scream that is running through nature, this atmosphere, he shouldn't need the figure to do it for it. He should allow the landscape and the treatment of the landscape to speak for itself.

34:15 I think it's just, I think it's ridiculous, actually. You think it's a bit of schlock? I think it's schlock. And actually there are other images... Are you standing by that? You don't feel you've worked yourself up into a passion here? No, I don't think so. And I'm not completely opposed to this motif.

34:29 As you say, there are other works he makes that have very similar composition, the despair images. There's actually a second picture he makes of despair, which again is very similar composition to this, but technically and visually much more sophisticated, more interesting. And it's just a human form.

34:44 It's a human figure just looking downwards. And for me, that's far more affecting than having this ghoulish spectre staring out at us. It is possible that this image is so famous and it's become such a cliché and it's just so damn familiar that instinctively anyone who, you know, is... prides themselves on being quite well-versed in art and art history, might be a bit like, it's just...

35:10 I'm not saying this is what your motivation is, because you've made a very compelling case, but, you know, that it's almost naff to like a painting like The Scream. Something I'm learning about you, I think, in doing this podcast is... Because this has taken me back to our debate about late Francis Bacon in the final episode of that series.

35:28 I think you are not a great fan of... lack of finish, shall we say. And with the scream and with indeed German expressionism that images like this kind of inspire, I find them deliriously exciting precisely for those negative attributes that you see in them. So that lack of finish, that slapdash quality, to me feels like that really is quite a radical development in art history and also feels somehow quite...

36:01 quite true in terms of conveying emotion. I love the fact that, as I was trying to say before, that the form, the way it's painted and the content are somehow here totally aligned. If you could imagine this concept, this motif being painted in that quasi-impressionistic way that Munch painted in the 1880s, it would be absurd.

36:24 I like the slapdash quality. I don't have a problem with the slapdash quality. It is a remarkable piece of making in that he's put this onto cardboard, which is a very unusual support for a picture. He hasn't applied a ground. He's applied the paint in a very unconventional way, a bit of tempera, a bit of oil.

36:42 Then he's let it dry. Then he's put pastel over the top of it. He's actually, at the bottom right of the picture, this might become important in the second half, there is a wax spatter that... Yes. When he was probably blown a candle out onto the picture. So for me, that kind of, that slightly clumsy quality to the making isn't my objection.

37:03 My objection to it is it's so on the nose. Except it's so strange. It is strange. I mean, that figure... I mean, how do you understand the figure? I was sort of asking before. I mean, you know, there is no definitive answer here, but it looks like one of those funny bone skeletons from that children's book who's lifting their skull off.

37:24 You know, it sort of feels detachable, that head. It doesn't feel like it's a living human person. It really is deliberately on the nose, confrontational, the way that it's confronting the viewer. I think that's part of the secret of its enormous success in the 20th century. And something else, just to leave aside personal opinion about it, I mean, I do think there is something to be said for...

37:50 innate respect for images that cut through on this level. You know, there aren't that many images that do it. You know, the Great Wave is one of them. You know, Flaming June, Mona Lisa, whatever it might be. There is something about this which... clearly resonates with many, many millions of people around the world.

38:10 And it's fascinating to try and untangle why. But I wouldn't, I mean, I know what you're saying and I can see where you're coming from and you make a very cogent point. But I'm slightly reluctant to kind of wade in after you, as it were, for that reason, partly. To bring it back to Francis Bacon that we discussed in a previous series, you opposed a lot of Francis Bacon's work because you felt they were too melodramatic.

38:33 Yes, I did. Yeah, this is not melodramatic enough for you. Oh, God, I'm hoisted on my own petard. Melodramatic petard. Look, it's definitely a really striking, shocking, memorable image. It is unforgettable. It is alienating. Do you think there is something... thing to this idea that over familiarity actually it's almost impossible to look at these images.

38:54 I mean it's interesting to get to grips with the development which is you know I was doing some of the reading before doing this and it's fascinating to see that and it feels that sort of defamiliarises the image to see its evolution. But there is still this moment where this odd worm-skulled androgynous creature arrives, that's a moment of what?

39:15 Essentially artistic inspiration. Yeah. And then appears in slightly different guises, possibly wearing a sort of slinky black dress, if it's a bald woman. And... But, you know, it's so famous that maybe there is a case to be made that it's almost impossible even to look at this thing now and be able to have an aesthetic judgment.

39:37 Maybe it's been destroyed by its afterlife that we'll be talking about in the second half. Yeah. I don't know. Quite possibly. And, you know, many images that are familiar in this way, they present these difficulties for us as people who are trying to approach them fresh. One thing we should say about the picture...

39:54 is there is a little secret inscription on the surface of the picture. Yes. And this is a really interesting story in its own right. So right at the top of this particular version, the National Gallery of Norway version, there is, in the sky, in the clouds, someone has written in pencil, could only have been painted by a madman.

40:13 And this is a really interesting thing. It's been around for a long time. I think it was first discovered over 100 years ago, I think in 1904. For a long time, people thought that this had been written by some appalled visitor. Well, there is, I think there is a, you know, people have gone back to the sources.

40:28 There was an exhibition in Copenhagen in 1904 And a reviewer talks about this specific work, The Scream, and in the course of that review refers to, on the bright red clouds of this picture, a tactless hand, as written in pencil, can only be painted by a madman. And I think the full context of the review has led some people to suggest that, well...

40:52 Basically, there is debate. There is huge debates. You know, there was a theory, I think, put about in the 70s by a particular art historian, that maybe this was Munch himself. Or there's this idea that didn't outrage spectator, a bit like those supposedly, those artists in Berlin in 1892, closing down the show within a week.

41:12 People are so... outraged almost by this image, the strangeness of it. It seems like an affront, an assault. The only way it can be parsed, the only way it can be explained is that the person who's made it is demented. And as an act of kind of what? A resistance. They're putting that inscription onto the painting.

41:29 Do you have a hunch? I think there was a study done. I think it's not just a hunch. I think they did a study at the National Gallery of Norway a few years ago, about five years ago. And they looked at it with an infrared light and they analysed the handwriting and they are pretty much convinced that Munk himself wrote it.

41:46 So the idea is that it's a kind of piece of self-publicity. It's myth-making. It's an awareness of public profile. I don't think so, because the inscription is so faint. You can't really see it. You almost, if you stand in front of the picture, you can't really see it. I think it's, you know, it reflects this feeling that Munch had throughout his life, which is that, you know, he was constantly fearful of, as he would have put it, going mad.

42:09 So I think that's part of it. And I think the thing to say about The Scream is whether we like it or whether we don't like it, it was extremely important to Munch, wasn't it? Which was why he kept returning to this motif again and again and again. Well, and partly because as his market starts to grow, there are patrons who are coming in and saying, I'd quite like to have that work, could I buy it?

42:32 And Munch is reluctant to let it go because he has that grand idea of the freeze of life, the big cycle of pictures. He wants to try and one day make that thing happen. Eventually he does show it, 22 pictures in Berlin, I think, in 1902, for example. That's sort of seen as the kind of best example of the freeze of life moment.

42:49 But... His solution is sometimes to those patrons to do them another version. So in 1895, the pastoral version, the one that sells for so much money in whenever it was, 2012, he does that for a German businessman who is, I think, a factory owner, patron of Munch's. And he can obviously hang on to his painting, The Scream, which was originally titled Despair.

43:13 It takes a while for that title to come in. The one that we've been describing, the one that's in the National Gallery, the National Museum in Oslo, they acquire it in 1910. And so that later version, which is painted, which is in the Munch Museum in Oslo today, the theory is that at the moment where someone persuades Munch to sell the Scream and give it to the museum, he then paints another version, which is the one that ends up in the Munch Museum.

43:42 But then I've read all this other fascinating stuff. I mean, it's a rabbit hole we're not going to get into now. But sort of going back to the original reviews, which refer to particular colours, and those colours more naturally match the supposed 1910 scream in the Mink Museum than the 1893 painting.

43:57 You have gone deep. I know, but once you do, I mean, it is a fascinating thing. But perhaps before we get any deeper, it's a good moment to pause. After the break, the plan is we're going to explore the afterlives of the scream during the 20th and 21st centuries, when this motif that we've been describing, Munch's motif, the scream, became this universal symbol of angst and dread and anxiety and despair to the point that even gets its own emoji.

44:31 A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. You can now find us on Instagram at storiesofart.henny. So please do follow us, comment, and by all means, suggest topics for future episodes. Welcome back to Stories of Art. In the first half of this episode, Alistair brilliantly talked us through the early life of Edvard Munch, the creation of the Scream and the picture or pictures themselves.

45:06 In this part, we are going to talk about the afterlife of the Scream, which I would argue is perhaps even more remarkable. It's where it gets really, really interesting. I mean, it wasn't interesting before. Yeah, yeah. Well done for sticking with that boring first half. No, no, of course, it's all fascinating.

45:24 But I find that the fact that this image or these series of images, they didn't really have the valency, the currency. Yeah. And it's just as his childhood was very sad, the rest of his life was pretty miserable. It was marked by loneliness and depression and alcoholism and despair and mental and physical illness.

46:02 In later life, Alistair, he became actually something of a recluse. Didn't he grow crops on various estates at some point? Yes. So in 1916, he bought a compound in Ekele, which is just outside of Oslo, and very rarely left this compound for the last 27, 28 years of his life. He got locks put on all the doors.

46:20 He allowed very few people to come and visit him. He slept with an axe and a gun by his pillow. And all the while, of course, I said in the first half, immensely productive artists, all the while painting picture after picture after picture, many of them rubbish, but loads and loads of pictures. And no one really knew what was being stockpiled behind these locked doors.

46:41 I mean, one of the fascinating things is there are some photographs, aren't there, of various studios, summer houses, winter studios. And you actually see in some of them the way he's arranging pictures around him, including the scream, which I think I forget the exact details, but there's one where it appears on one side of a doorframe next to other images.

46:59 So that sort of idea he had of this... I do think, hats off to him. I can detect some scepticism on your part, but his idea of the way that images don't have to be discrete, unique, single things encountered in the gallery, but can proliferate like Topsy and get out there. And he makes them simultaneously.

47:20 When you see the photographs, he has them all lined up often in the studio. And he's going back and forth from one to the other, from one to the other with the colours. Like a chess grandmaster. Yeah, exactly. This is how he does it. So he lives this increasingly hermetic, if you like, existence in Ekele.

47:35 And in April 1940, this is just a few days after the Nazis invade Norway during the Second World War, he makes out a will. And... And in that will, Alistair, this gives you a sense of how productive he was. He left 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings, 15,391 prints and loads of photographs to the municipality of Oslo.

48:04 We think he does this because he doesn't want the Nazis to get the work. Because there was some interest on the Nazi side, wasn't there? His work had been seen as degenerate and then suddenly wasn't being shown in galleries, including in Norway, which, of course, was occupied by the Nazis. Yes. But my understanding is that there were these tendencies within Nazi sympathising sides who saw in Munch's work maybe a sense of Nordic slash Northern European slash, you know, kind of German exceptionalism and wanted to rehabilitate him.

48:35 And he's resisting the Third Reich. Yes, he also wants the works to stay together. It's one of the reasons why there are so many in the compound. He didn't really like to sell his works. He did sell some, but he was naturally paranoid of art dealers and the art market. He also felt that these works were part of him.

48:54 They were like his children. He didn't have a wife and children. They were like his children. They were parts of his diary. So he wanted to keep them close. His abortive runt child of the scream. It's actually close to him throughout his life. It does look a bit like a fetus, though. doesn't it? It does.

49:06 And in 1944, when he is 80 years old, so four years after he makes out the will, he dies and the collection passes to the city of Oslo. And that forms the basis for the Munk Museum. So do you think, I mean, because that's, in a way, that's, it's quite sort of a technical, I mean, it's amazing to hear how prolific he was.

49:25 But do you think that's important in terms of the story of the Scream becoming that popular image? Crucial. Crucial. And why? Why is that? I think when it comes to artworks becoming famous over long periods of time, location really matters. You have to get your works into public collections, national collections if you can.

49:46 It's what Turner understood. He left all of his work to the state. Obviously, Turner was a magnificent artist, but had that body of work been distributed in private collections and only a few pictures here and there been in the Tate or the National Gallery, I think his fame wouldn't be quite what it was.

49:59 And I think Munch understood that. Yeah. And I think so much of this, the cult of Munch, that sort of inseparability of Munch and Norwegian identity, is connected to the fact that so much of his work is in national collections. And we've established that he has this sort of antennae, doesn't he, for the way he's perceived.

50:21 He does. So he loves... The negative publicity that happens is the Munch affair. And then potentially, although I know we slightly disagreed on the significance of it, but, you know, is writing created by a madman onto the picture. Certainly in that 1904 review I mentioned where someone is talking about that inscription, Munch is kind of quoted saying, essentially, yep, that's how people see me.

50:42 So he's aware. He's aware of that sort of profile. So by the time he dies in 1944, he's a pretty famous artist in Norway. He's pretty well respected by the avant-garde in Germany. But he is by no means a household name. He's not famous around the world. The Scream isn't famous around the world. And on that point, I mean, the stat that I came across that I thought was fascinating, they're roughly speaking about 300 exhibitions of Munch's work in his lifetime.

51:10 And according to one count, there are only 28 shows of those 300 in which The Scream appears. Very interesting. Yeah. Well, the first big breakthrough moment comes in 1950, actually. So this is six years or so after he dies. The Norwegian government and the city of Oslo sponsor a grand American tour of his works, including The Scream.

51:37 And they go to the States and they tour, I think, 10 museums in the United States. And no one in America, really, apart from the most literate art lovers, have ever even heard of Edvard Munch. So it's a massive sensation, this extraordinary European figure who no one had heard of coming and having these extraordinary powerful images.

51:55 And that's when the scream in particular begins to get traction. That's when it begins to permeate the broader culture. And can we mesh... the sort of wider preoccupations of what's going on in the culture at the time with the sudden success and emergence of the scream? You know, is there something which is happening in society that means it's an opportune moment for an image like that to suddenly have this great currency, if you like?

52:20 Are you thinking Cold War anxiety, possibly? That would be the obvious thing, wouldn't it? You know, it's the atomic era. It's a moment of great post-Second World War sort of despair. It's the moment back in Europe of kind of existentialism. And it makes sense to me that in the 50s, suddenly this image in particular is one that's going to resonate because it feels, even though it wasn't Munch's intention at all, like it's expressing and articulating the anxieties of that moment.

52:51 Well... I'm pleased you said that because in 1961, this meshing absolutely happens because in 1961, The Scream makes the cover of Time magazine. Right. And that is to illustrate a story called The Anatomy of Angst. Right. Well, here we go. Which is about this age of anxiety. This, I think, is the first major breakout moment for The Scream.

53:14 Yeah. Because this is, first of all, when it's on a magazine, it's seen and held by millions of people around the United States. I mean, Time. Yeah, Time magazine. Massive in 1961. It's in people's homes. And it's also, I think, the first real time when the scream gets enlisted, not as an art historical fact, but as a kind of metaphor for a universal anxiety, as we've talked about.

53:39 That's very interesting. Just explain a little more what you mean by that. So it's being used almost not as a painting, but... Like the sort of original context of it painted in, you know, here it was exhibited first in Berlin, 1890s sort of symbolism piece. There's none of that. That's not of interest to the editors.

53:57 There's none of that at all. This is an essay about how in the early 1960s, American people are living through this great age of anxiety. Lots of parallels with today. Yeah. Yeah. And this was the image that they'd probably seen at one of those big shows. A picture editor somewhere at Time magazine had probably seen The Scream in one of those big exhibitions back in 1950 and had thought, this is a great way to illustrate this particular idea.

54:18 There is nothing art historical about it at all. I'm not even sure if Edvard Munch is mentioned in the picture. piece. And so this is the age of mechanical reproduction. And the idea is that by being on the cover of something like Time magazine, maybe that picture editor inadvertently has kind of been saying, I'm going to make you a star, as in you, the work of art by Edvard Munch.

54:38 And I think he does. And so as you move through the 1960s and into the 1970s and through into the 1980s, you begin to see it. permeating society more and more and more. It goes on to another cover, a very famous cover, Arthur Yanov's book, The Primal Scream, which is about scream therapy that so many famous people are conducting in the 1960s and 1970s.

55:02 I think your favourite artist, Andy Warhol, I'm glad you mentioned Andy Warhol. I was hoping he'd come. I mean, I find the Warhol moment really significant, particularly in light of what you've just said. So my memory of this is that Andy Warhol, he's invited to Norway. He makes a series of works of art which are riffing on various prints by Munch, not only The Scream, but including The Scream.

55:24 And these are, I think The Scream one, it dates from what, 1984? Gotcha. 24 years. But the interesting thing is that by this point, it's quite late in Andy Warhol's career. You know, his pop art moment was in the 60s and he becomes famous for those silkscreen reproduced images of movie stars or, you know, tomato soup cans, whatever it might be.

55:43 But it's finding things in popular culture that themselves are like artefacts that he can then depict. So a movie star is as much of a sort of, it's not necessarily about the psychology of the person. It's about that sort of public artefact that is movie starness or whatever. And in a sense, that's what's happening here.

56:02 Already for Warhol, the screen functions a bit like the way you were describing that cover of the Time magazine, where it's not so much about the specifics of it as a work of art. But it's the fact that already it has this wider, what's the word, like resonance, currency in the culture. And that's kind of what his work is about.

56:20 Absolutely. So through the 1980s and into the 1990s, it becomes more part of the popular culture, including this one of the reasons why Andy Warhol draws on it. But another big breakthrough moment for The Scream comes in 1994. And this is an incredible story, and I've been really looking forward to telling it.

56:39 So it's the 12th of February, 1994. It is the opening day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. And the world's press, and this is important, a third of Norway's police force is in Lillehammer. Right. So 100 miles south of Lillehammer. Right. At 6.30 in the morning on the 12th of February 1994, two thieves pull up to the National Museum of Norway.

57:05 This is very Chuckle Brothers. Because they have a ladder. Yes. And they lean the ladder against the side of the museum. One of them holds the ladder. The other one climbs up the ladder and falls off. Actually falls off. He falls off. There's CCTV footage. Right. Falls off, gets back on the ladder, climbs up, breaks the window on the first floor, runs into the gallery, and a few minutes later he comes out down the ladder with the scream, the first scream, the one we discussed in the first half.

57:31 Yes. From 1893, under his arm. He has time to leave a little note in the gallery saying, thanks for the poor security. Yeah. And they disappear. And the security services don't get there for 20 minutes or so. So this is an absolute disaster. As I say, all the press are in Norway, of the world. And so it becomes a massive, massive news story.

57:51 And by now, this is a work which has the sort of prestige and universal resonance that we're familiar with today. I mean, this is, what, 30 odd years ago. But it's been established as this kind of iconic, popular icon of world culture. Yeah, and we're not talking front cover of Time magazine in the States.

58:07 We're talking front cover of newspapers all over the world. So obviously a very important moment in terms of increasing that visibility of the picture. Oh, hang on. That's interesting. So you're saying that the robbery, this famous 1994 art heist, is contributing to the celebrity of Munch's screen? The thief himself, we will come to that in a minute, claimed that he was the one who made the screen famous.

58:31 Okay. So anyway, they steal the screen, they disappear. The police try to locate it. They have no success. A month later, in March 1994, a ransom is issued. And the thieves ask for, I think, a million dollars in return for the picture. The National Museum refuses to pay it. Now, at this point, Scotland Yard, good old Scotland Yard here in London, not far from where we're sitting, Alistair, they say, do you want some help?

59:01 Because they have a policeman in Scotland Yard, a man called Charles Hill or Charlie Hill, who is famous for being able to recover stolen artwork. I think he works with, or his boss was Dick Ellis, who was in the same unit who I've interviewed. Have you? Yeah, I have. I once did a programme about stolen art, although we didn't tell the story of this particular heist, which is why it's gripping for me to hear it now.

59:19 OK, well, Charlie Hill hatches a plan, and his plan is to create a fake identity and to masquerade as an American art dealer called Chris Roberts, who is a buyer for the Getty. So Getty, Los Angeles, massively rich museum. Exactly right. And so together with the Getty and Scotland Yard and I think the Norwegian government, they create this entirely false identity, false passports, false bank cards, false checkbooks, even pay slips from the Getty dating back five years.

59:51 And Charles Hill, or Chris Roberts, as we should probably call him now, makes contact with a dealer who's a sort of go-between and they arrange to go and meet... and have us a rendezvous in Oslo and to discuss what kind of amount of money might be needed to get the picture back. Was there something about, what's their sort of cover story?

1:00:09 The idea is that the Getty is going to fund the ransom and in exchange they would get to exhibit the scream, something like that? Yes, exactly. So that's their story. Yeah, it's a pretty murky Covey story at this point. But anyway, in May 1994, he travels to Oslo to meet the go-between at the Plaza Hotel.

1:00:27 And this is like a comedy film. But at exactly that time, in that same hotel, there is the annual convention of, let me get this right, the Swedish narcotics officers. Ah, OK. And they, many of them, or some of them at least, know Charlie Hill because there are the police officers. Hi, Charles, what are you doing here?

1:00:45 The cover isn't blown. And he starts embarking on several days' worth of negotiation with the go-between. And eventually they agree to take him to the picture. And on the 7th of May, Charlie Hill, or Chris Roberts, was driven to a village just outside of Oslo to a summer house. And they go into the summer house, go into the kitchen, and the carpet of the kitchen is pulled up.

1:01:08 And underneath the carpet, there is a trap door. Right. And the go-between says, well, the picture's down there. Go down and have a look at it. Charlie Hill doesn't want to do that for obvious reasons. He thinks he's never going to come out. Yeah. So one of the thieves goes down and a minute later comes out with the scream.

1:01:24 Now, Hill knows he's not an art historian, but he has memorised every single aspect of this picture. And the thing he has memorised, we mentioned it in the first half, he has memorised the candle wax spatter. Right. And it is exactly the same pattern of wax on the picture. So he knows immediately that this is the...

1:01:41 I mean, that would be a very sophisticated forger who could replicate that. Exactly. So he knows this is the real deal. And at that point, police officers rush in, both at the summer house and in another venue, and four men are arrested. So it's a sting operation, as well. It's a sting operation. So they arrest these guys.

1:01:59 Four men are then, I think, imprisoned. The ringleader was a guy called Paul Enger, who was a professional footballer. I think I'd come across that. Turned serial criminal. He is the man who said that he was the one who made the Scream famous. He sounds quite flash in general. I mean, I think at one point he claimed he had the only Porsche in Oslo.

1:02:16 You know, he was involved with organised crime and stuff. Also, one of the go-betweens was the Thai kickboxing champion of Norway. So it was a common... I mean, it's a ridiculous story. But the fascinating thing is that, you know, there is still now, there is this kind of myth, isn't there? This idea that when you have these big high-profile art heists, that somewhere there's some Mr. Big who's commissioned it, who's like, I want to have, you know, the scream in my private study behind this fake bookcase, whatever.

1:02:43 And invariably, when you look at the actual cases... It's never the case. Mr. Big, who's a very big figure in film, just doesn't really exist. Doesn't really exist. But do you know there's a twist in the tale? So these four guys are arrested, convicted, imprisoned. And in the end, three of those convictions are overturned because Charlie Hill and some other British officers entered Norway under false identities.

1:03:07 Well, there's a technicality. The technicality, the convictions were quashed. So that is the story. The scream does end up being returned. Was it damaged? Very little damage. Very little damage was done to the picture. And so it's back now in the National Museum of Norway. Now, that's a pretty big moment.

1:03:24 But would you believe it? Ten years later, the scream, it's a different scream this time, is stolen again. Jeez, okay. So this is a different kind of theft. It's 11.20 in the morning on Sunday, the 22nd of August, 2004. Yeah. The museum is open. This is the Munk Museum this time. So this is the one that I think in the first half I was saying, look, there's a debate about the date, but it's probably 1910 it's painted, so it's quite a bit later.

1:03:50 That's the painting they own. That's the one we're talking about, right? That is the painting. So it's the Munk Museum. It's also in Oslo. The museum is open, so visitors and staff are there, when two armed thieves... So these are armed figures. One of them has a gun, certainly. They're both in balaclavas.

1:04:05 Les Chukle Brothers. Les Chukle Brothers, although... Well, we'll see. They run into the gallery. One of them holds the visitors and the staff at gunpoint. The other one takes two pictures off the wall. So there's the scream, the later scream of 1910, but also a painting that you mentioned in the first half called The Madonna.

1:04:23 Right. Very controversial picture in its own right. Very sexy image. And they run out of the gallery. And one of them, I think, drops the... picture on the pavement as he's running down the street. And a tourist takes a photograph of them, you know, holding these pictures. So it is actually quite Chuckle Brothers getting into a black Audi and the Audi disappears.

1:04:44 So here is another image that is stolen. I actually happened to be in Norway at the time. Yeah, so I had a Norwegian girlfriend at the time. You took that picture? Yeah. It was a massive, massive story in Norway at the time, as you might imagine. And the picture, I think, wasn't insured. Right. Neither of them was insured because the cost, the value was so enormous.

1:05:05 The following year, someone was arrested. More arrests followed that. Eventually, six men faced charges. But the picture was not recovered. And in June 2005, so this is almost a year after the theft, 2 million kroner was offered for information. M&Ms offered 2 million M&Ms. Sorry, the confectionary? The confectionary company offered 2 million M&Ms as a reward for someone who could provide information leading to the recovery of the population.

1:05:36 What did they see? Some correspondence between the shiny paint of the Scream figure and their product? I don't know why they did it. Anyway, eventually, 31st of August 2006, so this is pretty much two years after they had been stolen, the pictures were recovered. But unlike the previous... theft, the circumstances surrounding the recovery are very mysterious.

1:05:58 They've never really been revealed by the police force. What's the theory? Charlie Hill, who obviously was instrumental in the recovery of the first scream, was... He claimed that someone in prison had the information and offered information regarding the whereabouts of the pictures in return for a financial reward and some prison privileges.

1:06:20 This is interesting because one of the big questions with art theft, if there isn't a Mr Big, why are people doing it? Because, of course, if you steal something as famous as The Scream, you can't sell it. No. It's insane to think that you could dispose of that and make some cash because it's sober. well known clearly yeah and that's true for far less famous works of art as well so one of the theories is my memory of this documentary i made years ago is that you know criminals they have a currency in the underworld where they can be effectively kind of collateral and bargaining chips and often if you're subsequently in a tight spot you have that information i didn't know that was the case with this 2004 theft if indeed it was you know it sounds like there's some speculation and that you can use to your advantage fascinating

1:07:03 It is fascinating. But let us bring this to the present day, because I think The Scream, as I think we said at the start, is arguably the most famous or one of the two or three most famous artworks in the world, together with the Mona Lisa. It's been endlessly reproduced, endlessly parodied, endlessly commodified across the world.

1:07:24 Fridge magnets, spirit bottles, mugs. Yeah. Why do you think it is? What do you think is the reason for its enduring power, Alistair? I thought you might ask me this. LAUGHTER And it's a very, very complex question to answer, isn't it? I mean, we've touched on some of the things, right? So there is a moment where it becomes famous, where it seems to speak to the concerns of that moment.

1:07:53 So we were talking about after the Second World War, Cold War, atomic era, existentialism, suddenly this figure in the foreground of the screen feels like it's an emanation of those concerns. Mushroom clouds. The mushroom clouds, you know. Yes. And the point there being that that landscape, of course, becomes very resonant in a later time where suddenly people are concerned with, say, climate change, essentially.

1:08:19 And suddenly it becomes this great icon as an image. of a world remember that this is meant to be the scream isn't the scream of the figure this is the great infinite scream of nature itself it's articulating our earth which humans have completely destroyed and damaged and here's someone who somehow on some subconscious level has presciently anticipated it I think there's something as well about the idea that once it begins to proliferate, it's like this fascinating, it is like a sort of virus or disease where it becomes something.

1:08:48 It's kind of what you were describing with the Time magazine cover. It becomes itself, it's like a touchstone, an easy reference point. Yeah. Anyone can take and it has itself a meaning which is instantly recognisable. And you could be artists. There are countless artists who have been inspired by and made work about the scream.

1:09:06 And we've mentioned Warhol, but, you know, Gilbert and George, Jasper Johns, Marina Abramovich. There's a whole host of people that you could sort of mention, but also cartoonists, clearly. You know, anyone on a political demonstration, you make a placard. Maybe you're protesting Brexit. Maybe it's about, you know, something to do with coronavirus.

1:09:26 You can make an image really swiftly. You know, there was a cartoon, wasn't there, in The Times, which was by Peter Brooks. the moment where Donald Trump first off becomes president, when it was 2016, and you see supposedly the inauguration, and there's Trump, I think, in the distance, and countless people, the supposed crowd that were there to see him, or were they, you know, we won't relisticate that debate, but all of the people are replicated versions of Munch's screen figure.

1:09:51 Yes. And it's saying immediately, uh-oh, you know, what's about to happen? It's a kind of symbol of concern. It's got all the ingredients. When you think about... artworks that have cut through. Yeah. Artworks that have broken out. So I think the first thing is, are they instantly recognizable? Are they quite simple?

1:10:07 Are they quite, I don't like the word, but quite iconic? And there is something, there's something very graphic. There's something very cartoony about this image. You can recognize it from a great distance. It's not a very complex or sophisticated image in some way. It literally works as a graphic work of art.

1:10:21 Exactly. In the lithography created in 1895. Yeah. You know, if you see it in The Simpsons, it's so easy to reproduce as a Simpsons cartoon. So I think you've got that. Yep. I think you've also got the fact that it entered the National Collection and became a very important part of Norwegian identity.

1:10:37 I think that's important. Then you've got the thefts. I mean, those thefts are the kind of things that get artworks. out of the art world and into the front pages of the news. So I'll tell you an interesting detail I came across about, I think, the latter theft, that there wasn't really that much footage that they had.

1:10:56 I think possibly there were some Austrian tourists who'd done a little bit of footage that could have been used on all of the news programmes. But it was a sensational story. All of the news channels wanted to talk about it. So they had to use the image itself to wallpaper those reports and... And as a result, every time something like that's happening, as Andy Warhol well recognised and knew, it is furthering the celebrity of the image.

1:11:18 What about our society today? We live in a society that is, you know, increasingly anxious in many ways. You know, Jonathan Haidt has written a book about the anxious generation. Yeah, there is, you know, an epidemic of various mental health issues spreading certainly through the developed world. It seems to speak to that as well, doesn't it?

1:11:37 I think it absolutely does. I mean, the fact that there is an emoji of it today really does say that this moment, it resonates for us. I spoke to the woman who designed the emoji. Ah, you kept that quiet. Yeah, there was a woman called Angela Guzman. who together with her colleague Raymond, I've forgotten his surname, they were asked by Apple about 20 years ago, when the first iPhone was coming out, to design a range of emojis.

1:12:03 And the only two, we mentioned this at the start, the only two artworks they were asked to turn into emojis were the Scream and Hokusai's Wave, both of which are very graphic, cartoony images in their own right, which I think sort of played into it. And I think what that means, I think that's really played a very powerful role.

1:12:22 It means that millions and millions of people are not just seeing this image, but they're kind of using this image daily. And, you know, you've got a stressful day at work. You can send a scream emoji if you're... if you've been dumped by your boyfriend, a scream emoji. If, oh, the UK's got a new prime minister, scream emoji.

1:12:42 It does seem to answer particular questions and speak to particular concerns that we have in this very fast-moving, anxiety-filled day. Do you think there's something else as well, which maybe we haven't touched on in this part of the conversation, which is that sort of... The ambiguity of the figure interests me.

1:13:01 The fact that you can't quite tell who this person is, man or woman, alive or dead. The fact as well that, you know, I described that earlier painting, which was a sort of a version of the motif before the actual scream, where you see a recognisable man who's looking away, but the fact that it's been turned.

1:13:18 And so it's very engaging, this sort of confrontation we have with the figure in the foreground. It's very connecting for you as a viewer. But because you can't quite read who the figure is, we collectively, each of us, can project in a sense almost whatever we like onto this sort of blank cipher of a person.

1:13:38 You're probably right, aren't you? I mean, I really dislike that figure. But I think it's probably the secret sauce behind the enduring power of this picture because it can stand for anyone and for anything in some ways. Well, Alistair, it has been a scream to talk to you about this. I can't believe you went for that.

1:13:56 To talk to you about the scream today. It has been good fun. Thank you very much. Until next time, goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Next time, we're travelling back to Renaissance Florence to begin a two-part series on the mysterious man behind the birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli.