The Scream

On the morning of 12 February 1994, the day of the opening ceremony of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, while every camera in Norway was pointed at a small Olympic village three hours north of Oslo, two men set a ladder against the outside wall of the Norwegian National Gallery. They climbed up to a second-floor window. They smashed the glass. They climbed in. They walked across the room. They lifted Edvard Munch's The Scream from its hooks. They walked back out the window. They climbed down the ladder. They got into a car. They drove off. The total time, from window-smash to car, was under fifty seconds.

On the floor of the gallery, where the painting had hung, they left a postcard. Hand-written. The text read, in Norwegian, approximately: thanks for the poor security.

The first theft

The painting was one of four versions of the composition Munch produced between 1893 and 1910 — two paintings, one drawing, one pastel — but it was the most reproduced of the set, and at the time the most accessible. It had been displayed at the National Gallery in a position that prioritised visibility over security: lower from the ceiling, easier to view, behind protective glass on standard museum wires. The thieves had been observed by a security camera. The footage was grainy. Two figures in dark clothing. A ladder. A van. They were Norwegian career criminals, as it would turn out.

Recovery took roughly three months. A British Scotland Yard officer, named Charley Hill, working with the Norwegian police, posed as an art-buying middleman from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He met with intermediaries. He negotiated, over several months, a series of meetings. He eventually offered, on tape, three hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds for the painting. The intermediaries agreed. They produced the painting at a hotel in Åsgårdstrand, a coastal town south of Oslo. Hill identified it as authentic. The Norwegian police, who had been listening, moved in. The Scream returned to the National Gallery.

The second theft

On Sunday 22 August 2004, around eleven in the morning, two armed men walked into the Munch Museum on the eastern side of central Oslo. The museum was open. Visitors were inside. The men had handguns visible. They walked across the gallery to a different version of the same composition — a separate Scream, displayed at the Munch Museum since the museum's founding — and took it from the wall. They also took, from the next wall, Munch's Madonna. They walked out a fire exit. They got into a black Audi parked outside. They drove off. Total time: ninety seconds.

This was a different kind of theft. The 1994 theft had been a quiet, classical break-in: window, ladder, postcard. The 2004 theft was an armed robbery in broad daylight, in front of civilians, with the willingness to use force if obstructed. Norwegian art crime had escalated in the intervening decade. The works themselves, now, were also being treated less carefully. The Scream, when it was eventually recovered, would show damage. Significant damage. From handling. From pressure. From two years out of any climate-controlled storage.

Recovery

Recovery took until August 2006 — two years almost to the day. Norwegian police had arrested several suspects in connection with the robbery by 2006, and convictions began that year at Oslo District Court. Of the men involved, three were convicted on the robbery charge, with sentences of four to eight years. The fourth, the gunman, was not convicted on the robbery charge directly but was, separately, serving a sentence for an unrelated armed robbery. Through a combination of police informants, plea negotiations, and some level of payment from a Norwegian insurance company, the location of the paintings was disclosed.

Both works were recovered. The Scream had a tear at one corner. There was moisture damage to a portion of the surface. The pastel layer had abraded in places, from contact with whatever the painting had been wrapped in during its two years out of the museum. The Munch Museum's restoration team worked on it for over two years before it was put back on public display.

The painting's record

The two completed thefts of The Scream are not the only incidents in the painting's police file. There have been other incidents — attempted thefts, threats, postcards — across the painting's display history. Most are noise. But the painting has, by the standards of any artwork in Europe, an unusually long police record. The pastel version of The Scream, sold at Sotheby's New York in 2012 for one hundred and twenty million dollars, briefly became the most expensive painting in art-market history. The two stolen versions are still in Oslo, in the institutions they were taken from, behind much heavier security than was in place in 1994 or 2004.

Munch painted The Scream as a depiction of a personal moment of overwhelming anxiety. He wrote about it in his diary. He described, in 1892, walking with friends along a fjord, and feeling a vast, immobilising terror. The painting is, in its own terms, a portrait of fear. The fact that the painting has been, twice in ten years, taken from museums under conditions of increasing violence, feels — in a way that is difficult to articulate cleanly — like a continuation of the painting's subject. The work depicts panic. The work generates panic. The work has been, twice, the subject of panic.

The visitors come, as they always have. They pause in front of the painting. They take phone photographs. Most know that the painting has been stolen. Few know that it has been stolen twice. The staff, who know, do not generally bring it up.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 11. Stream the episode here.