This discovery will make art lovers scream again.
Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” – an 1893 expressionist painting so famous that it has its own emoji – contains a disturbing hidden message that art historians have determined to have been written by the artist himself.
The pencil inscription says: “It must have been painted by a madman”, show the infrared scans.
And although historians already know the phrase, small and hidden among the distorted strokes that make up the howling figure, it is speculated that it was graffiti by an observer, not by the Norwegian artist.
But that mystery can now be solved, said Mai Britt Guleng, curator of ancient masters and modern paintings at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Norway, which owns the painting.
Guleng and his team made the revolutionary discovery after comparing the handwriting on the inscription to the Norwegian artist’s diaries and letters.
“The writing is undoubtedly Munch’s own,” she told the BBC. “The calligraphy itself, as well as the events that occurred in 1895, when Munch first showed the painting in Norway, everything points in the same direction.”
The phrase’s mysterious origins help complete a sad picture: Munch created the painting, which has now become a universal symbol for deadly anxiety, shortly after his sister Laura was admitted to a nursing home with bipolar disorder.
Although the screaming figure does not look like him, it is believed that he was influenced by his own experience of observing a blood-red sky after being abandoned by two companions, seen in the background. At that time, he was hit by a “blast of melancholy”, according to his diary.
After Munch developed the painting, the reactions focused on his own mental health, not the painting itself.
Experts said it stands to reason that Munch wrote the inscription “crazy man” after struggling with the many critical analyzes at the time. In 1908, he suffered a mental breakdown.
“It is a combination of being ironic, but also showing your vulnerability,” Guleng told the Guardian. “In fact, he is taking this very seriously and is hurt because there is a history of illness in his family, and he was very anxious, but he was marked by it.”