Word: munches
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...leaving creases that required restoration. The Scream is especially vulnerable because it was painted on cardboard, which is less supple than canvas and also does not absorb paint as well. The slightest bend could cause pigment to flake away. If that happens, the anguished little man in Munch's picture won't be the only one who feels like screaming. --Reported by Walter Gibbs/Oslo, Lina Lofaro and Carolina A. Miranda/New York, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Aatish Taseer/London and Charles P. Wallace/Berlin
...world's best known paintings was discouraging news not only for anyone who cares about art but especially for museum officials and gallery owners, who know how vulnerable their treasures are. Nothing could be worse than the thought of a canvas as important as The Scream, Edvard Munch's indelible image of a man howling against the backdrop of a blood-red sky, disappearing into a criminal underworld that doesn't care much about the niceties of art conservation. Art theft is a vast problem around the world. As many as 10,000 precious items of all kinds disappear each...
...thieves who snatched The Scream and one other Munch canvas from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, subjected them to rough handling from the start. On Aug. 22, at 11:10 a.m., about an hour after the museum opened, two men wearing hooded sweatshirts, gloves and ski masks burst through a side entrance. One of them waved a pistol, terrifying visitors, then pointed it at the head of an unarmed female guard and barked in Norwegian, "Lie down!" Meanwhile an accomplice dashed through the ground-floor galleries until he came upon Munch's Madonna from 1893-94. The apotheosis...
Although large museums have had their share of embarrassing robberies--in 1911 the Mona Lisa was taken from the Louvre--the greatest problem is small institutions like the Munch Museum or private homes open to the public. Neither can afford elaborate security. Large museums attach alarms to their most valuable canvases, but a modest alarm system can cost $500,000 or more. Some museums are looking into tracking devices that would allow them to follow stolen items once they leave the premises. "But conservators are concerned that if they have to insert something, it might damage the object," says Wilbur...
...black market. The Scream, an image nearly everybody knows, is not the kind of thing an unscrupulous buyer could hang in his mansion in plain sight. For that matter, it's hard to imagine some Russian kleptocrat or Colombian drug lord lusting to own anything by the gloomy, sepulchral Munch, not so long as there's an Impressionist landscape to be had instead...