Word: screaming
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Like many great works, neither painting was insured for theft. The high premiums on very famous pictures would be budget busters even for the largest museums. An earlier version of The Scream--there are four--was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo 10 years ago. Three months later, officers from Scotland Yard posing as art experts from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles approached the thieves with an offer to buy the painting, then arrested them when they produced...
...Vassiliou, a tourist from New Jersey who witnessed the robbery, told TIME, "It looked like he was crazy. He was banging it against the wall. Then he got it off the wall, and he was banging it on the floor." Witnesses say the same man next went after The Scream, which he ripped in the same brutal way from the partition--not even a solid wall--it was hung on. "They dragged them and twisted them and did all sorts of things," says museum director Gunnar Sorensen...
...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...
...that they have The Scream, what can the thieves do with it? The very thing that makes some paintings especially valuable--fame--makes them very difficult to fence on the 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...