Something to shout about … The Scream is coming to Scots gallery

Published on Tuesday 10 March 2009 20:48

THE Scream, one of the world's most famous images, is coming to Scotland in an exhibition of Edvard Munch's works that is expected to be a major draw this summer.

The black-and-white version of the iconic painting that goes on show in Glasgow this June

is one of several prints that the Norwegian artist produced of his seminal work.

Printed from a lithograph stone, it is part of an exhibition of 40 Munch prints, etchings and woodcuts lent by Oslo's Munch Museum in an exchange deal with the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery.

Munch's two original, brightly coloured paintings of The Scream are no longer lent outside Norway. They are kept under tight security after one of them was stolen in a 2004 art heist. It was later returned.

Increasingly, prints of the picture, called the first to capture modern anxiety and loneliness, are also being held back. The century-old print on show in Glasgow will not go on with the rest of the exhibition to Dublin.

The Munch Museum's senior curator, Magne Bruteig, told The Scotsman: "They will have this Scream lithograph as the last gallery or museum to get it. They have been so often exhibited that we have to stop lending them. Paper works are vulnerable to light exposure."

The Hunterian expects 40,000 people to come to Edvard Munch: Prints this summer. "He's a fantastic artist, and it is a selection of his greatest prints. There is a problem in Britain that so little of his work is in any public collections," said the Hunterian curator, David Black.

Munch copied his paintings obsessively, making thousands of prints, and was a pioneering figure in the use of woodcuts and other techniques.

He used them to keep copies of works like The Scream, which he had sold. Today, major Munch prints of famous works, which rarely come on the market, have been valued at 1.5 million, and lesser-known ones are worth tens of thousands of pounds.

Most remain in his native Norway, with many in the Munch Museum, after he bequeathed a huge collection of paintings, drawings and almost all his prints to the city of Oslo. One Munch painting, Vampire, sold recently for 26 million.

The Hunterian show includes The Violin Concert, with its portrait of Eva Mudocci, the British violinist with whom Munch is thought to have had an affair.

Other works include Melancholy, of a gloomy figure on the Norwegian shore, and Moonlight, a dream image said to show the artist's first love. Paintings by Munch, who lived from 1863 to 1944, were first shown in Britain in 1931, by the Society of Scottish Artists in Edinburgh.

PICTURE OF PAIN

THE original painting of The Scream, from 1893, hangs in the National Gallery of Norway, in Oslo. Edvard Munch

gave it the German title Der Schrei der Natur – The Scream of Nature.

It shows a screaming figure on a road by the sea, surrounded by sweeping lines, with boats in the distance. A second painting, pastel and prints followed.

The gallery's label says it conveys "a modern sense of life prone to anxiety, alienation and loneliness".

Munch was prone to the depression and despair often captured in his work.

He said of the moment he was inspired to paint the picture: "I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

FORGERY FLOOD

SCOTTISH artist Peter Howson claimed yesterday the art market had been flooded by more than 200 forgeries of his work.

Glasgow-based Mr Howson, whose work has sold to celebrity collectors for hundreds of thousands of pounds, said he was aware of ten fakes offered for sale in the past month alone, some of them through the auction website eBay.

"I have a couple in my studio at the moment. Like all the forgeries they are terrible," he said.

In May, Mr Howson is due to mount an exhibition on the subject of famine, with works drawn in boot polish and candle wax.