What do you think of this fact?
Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” is one of the most famous paintings in the world. A figure with a wide-open mouth in front of a fiery red sky. What many people don’t know: there’s also a little sentence on the painting.
A sentence in the corner
In the upper left corner of the 1893 version, there’s a tiny pencil inscription in Norwegian. Translated, it reads: “Can only have been painted by a madman.” According to Apollo Magazine, it was noticed no later than 1904.
For a long time, experts thought an outraged visitor had secretly written it on the painting. After all, it sounds like an insult.
The handwriting gives it away
In 2021, the National Museum of Norway in Oslo examined the inscription more closely. According to Apollo, the experts used infrared images, which made the handwriting clear enough to analyze.
The result was clear: Munch had written the sentence himself. According to Art & Object, it probably dates from after 1895. In October 1895, the painting was shown in Norway for the first time. At an event afterwards, a medical student named Johan Scharffenberg declared publicly that Munch wasn’t a normal human being.
Bonus fact: According to Art & Object, curator Mia Britt Guleng said: “The writing is without a doubt Munch’s own.” The museum believes Munch was in the audience when Scharffenberg spoke.
So Munch probably wrote the very accusation onto his own painting with a mix of irony and hurt. Maybe he wanted to show that words like that wouldn’t get him down.
Today, the little pencil line is one more puzzle around an already mysterious painting. A visit to Oslo pays off twice: once for the scream and once for the small print.