Thieves Take Munch’s “The Scream,” “Madonna”

Olso’s Munch Museum was the site of an armed robbery over the week-end. Two masked men, one of whom allegedly held a gun to a guard’s head, took off with “The Scream” and “Madonna” a pair of paintings by the late Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, while a third man drove the get-away car. While art lovers everywhere feel a loss, there is no reason to believe that the paintings will not be returned in perfect condition. Nor is there any reason to believe that their destruction would represent a triumph of the philistines – not with digital imaging and the internet.

For anyone who has ever stood in front of “The Mona Lisa” in the Louvre, Seurat’s “Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte” at the Art Institute of Chicago, or any of the works at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, there is an immediacy and connection that cannot be duplicated. It is the same sensation that one gets looking at the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives in Washington or in holding an autograph of an actor or athlete.

And one of the problems with great works of art is that they are transitory. All materials are subject to decay, even stone. Someday, no matter how hard the preservationists work to protect them, the world’s great art works will vanish. It may take thousands of years in the case of Michelangelo’s “David,” but it will happen. Add in vandalism, fire and earthquake, and the inevitability moves forward in time.

Yet, Mr. Munch made more than one version of his famous painting (another copy of “The Scream) was stolen from Norway's National Gallery right before the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994. And it appears in various forms like postcards and T-shirts. Whether one knows the name of the artist or not, one knows the work in some form. And if the original is destroyed, the work remains all over the internet, almost perfectly preserved, copied as often as one can hit the print key.


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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