The Scream

Munch made several versions of this image between 1893 and 1910, and this is the pastel he drew in 1895, worked in chalky colour on board. The figure in front, hands pressed to its face, is not the one screaming. Munch said the scream came from outside, from nature itself, and on the frame of this very version he wrote the sentence by hand: he had felt a great scream pass through nature. Behind the figure the path runs down toward the fjord by the city then called Kristiania, today's Oslo, with two people walking on unbothered. This version has a history the other three do not. It belonged to the Norwegian businessman Thomas Olsen, a neighbour and patron of Munch, and when Germany occupied Norway in 1940 Olsen hid his Munch pictures in a hay barn to keep them from the occupiers. His son sold this pastel in 2012 for close to 120 million dollars, at the time the most ever paid for a work of art at auction.