The Scream

This is not the painting. It is one sheet from an unrecorded print run of about thirty to forty-five lithographs that Munch pulled from a single stone in 1895, a black and white impression carrying both the German title 'Geschrei' and the full line 'Ich fuehlte das grosse Geschrei durch die Natur' printed into the same stone as the image. It reached the Metropolitan Museum in 1982 through the bequest of Scofield Thayer, the Dial magazine's editor and a voracious buyer of works on paper in the early 1920s, and was formally accessioned in 1984.

No sale record exists for this particular sheet. A different, black and white impression of the same edition, once owned by Munch's patron Olaf Schou, came up at Sotheby's London in 2016 with an estimate of 800,000 to 1,200,000 pounds; a completely different object in a completely different medium, a 1895 pastel version of the same motif, sold at Sotheby's New York in 2012 for 119,922,600 dollars. Neither of those is this print, and this print was never involved in either of the two thefts that made the painted Scream world-famous for the wrong reasons, in 1994 and 2004.

The Met's own public catalogue currently flags this object as not public domain, while Wikimedia Commons hosts a CC0-dedicated photograph of the same sheet donated by the Met itself in 2017. Both facts are true at once and neither source resolves the other.

What the Met physically owns

The sheet measures 51.4 by 39.7 centimetres, with the printed image occupying 35.7 by 23.6 centimetres of it. It is a lithograph pulled in black ink from a single stone, on wove paper, with no hand-colouring. Direct examination of the Metropolitan Museum's own donated photograph of the sheet (the file the museum itself gave to Wikimedia Commons) shows the full text block intact: Munch's monogram and the date '95 printed at the lower right of the image, the German title 'Geschrei' beneath it, and beneath that the line 'Ich fuehlte das grosse Geschrei durch die Natur'. All three are part of the same lithographic pull, not additions in another hand or medium.

This is one physical sheet among an unknown but limited number pulled from the same stone in 1895. It is not the 1893 painting in Oslo, not either of the pastel versions, and not any of the other surviving lithograph impressions in other collections. Every claim in this record concerns this sheet specifically unless stated otherwise.

One motif, several physically separate objects

The Scream motif exists as a sequence of distinct objects made between 1892 and 1895, most of them one-of-a-kind, and confusing them with each other is the most common error made about this image. Munch's friend Christian Skredsvig recorded that Munch had long wanted to paint a memory of a blood-red sunset while the two of them were staying near Nice in the winter of 1891-92; the first realisation was the painting Sick Mood at Sunset. Despair (1892, oil on canvas, now Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm), a conventionally composed figure study with none of the later distortion.

The image then changed sharply in style over roughly a year. Two painted versions of The Scream itself followed: one dated 1893, tempera and crayon on cardboard, now in the National Museum of Norway (formerly the National Gallery), Oslo, accession NG.M.00939; and a second, in the Munch Museum, Oslo, MM.M.00514, whose date is disputed between 1893 and a proposed 1910 based on pigment analysis. Two large drawn or pastelled versions also exist: one in crayon, Munch Museum, and a second in pastel dated 1895, which remained in private hands and was not seen publicly for decades until it sold at auction in 2012. This lithograph, also 1895, is the last object in the sequence and the only one made as a print rather than a unique work.

Why a print, after the image already existed as a painting

Munch had been painting versions of the motif since 1892 and had shown The Scream in Berlin in December 1893 as part of a six-picture sequence he titled Love, the beginning of what he would later call the Frieze of Life. He was working through the mid-1890s inside the Scandinavian and German bohemian circle that met at the Berlin wine bar Zum schwarzen Ferkel, which included August Strindberg, Stanislaw Przybyszewski and Dagny Juel, and he had begun making his first etchings and drypoints in Berlin in the workshop of the printmaker L. Angerer.

Munch stated his own reason for taking up graphic media directly: 'My intention in working with graphics was to bring my art into many homes.' A painting is one object that one owner can hold. A lithograph stone can produce many sheets, each cheap enough that a person who could never buy a Munch painting could own one. That is the entire economic logic of why the image exists twice, in two different media, two years apart.

The reversal problem

A lithograph stone prints in mirror reverse of whatever is drawn or inked onto it. Because Munch already had a painted composition he wanted the print to match, he had to draw or ink the image onto the stone backwards, so that the sheet coming off the press would read in the same left-right orientation as the 1893 painting rather than its mirror image. This is a real, verifiable technical fact about how the print was made, not a curatorial flourish: it is why the man on the bridge, the receding rail and the fjord behind him sit on the same sides of the sheet as they do in the painted versions.

The walk, the text, and where the two accounts differ

The line printed beneath the image on this sheet is drawn from an autobiographical text Munch had written some years before the print was made, describing a walk at sunset near Kristiania (now Oslo) with two friends: the sky turning blood red, a feeling of exhaustion, and, in his own words, sensing 'a great scream through nature'. The Munch Museum dates the origin of this text to Nice, in the winter of 1891-92, the same stay during which Skredsvig recorded his own account of the episode.

The two accounts are not a flat contradiction, but they are not the same story either. Munch's own text is a first-person description of the anxiety attack itself, written as if experienced in the moment. Skredsvig's, published in his own memoir in 1908, frames the same period as Munch having long wished to paint a specific memory of a blood-red sunset, and being saddened because he doubted painting was equal to the task, which is a claim about intention and technical doubt rather than a description of a walk. Whether Skredsvig's account describes the same originating moment as Munch's diary text, an earlier stage of the same memory, or a version filtered through what Munch later told him, is not resolved in the sources consulted here.

An edition without an edition

No formal print run was ever published or numbered. The Munch Museum, which holds six impressions itself, states plainly that it does not know exactly how many were pulled and estimates the figure at around thirty. Print-trade cataloguing around the 2016 Sotheby's sale of a comparable impression put the number nearer forty-five, and attributed the eventual end of the run to Munch's Berlin printer grinding the stone down before further pulls could be taken, whether by accident or through ordinary studio practice of that period. No source consulted here gives a definitive, sourced total.

The impressions that survive are not uniform. Some are plain black and white, exactly like this one. At least one, held by the Munch Museum, was hand-coloured by Munch himself in watercolour. Some carry only the title 'Geschrei'; some carry the title and the full line beneath it, the variant cataloguers refer to as Woll's variation A; and on a number of surviving sheets the text has simply been trimmed away by past owners or framers, so it no longer exists on the object even though it was originally printed there.

This impression, precisely

The Met's sheet is plain black and white, with no hand-colouring, and carries both the title 'Geschrei' and the full inscription 'Ich fuehlte das grosse Geschrei durch die Natur', confirmed by direct examination of the museum's own photograph rather than inferred from a general description of the edition. That places it in the same textual variant as the impression at Thielska Galleriet in Stockholm and the impression at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, both examined for this record, and in the same variant as the Olaf Schou impression sold at Sotheby's in 2016. It is not, on that basis, a uniquely rare textual state; the rarity claims made in the auction trade attach to the black-and-white, fully inscribed sheets as a group relative to the trimmed or textless ones, not to any single sheet within that group including this one.

Scofield Thayer and the route to the Met

Scofield Thayer edited and co-published the literary magazine The Dial from 1919 to 1926, introducing American readers to T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Thomas Mann among others. Between 1921 and 1923 he assembled, with considerable speed, a collection of roughly six hundred works, most of them on paper, buying in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna; while a patient of Sigmund Freud in Vienna he also acquired a substantial group of Klimt and Schiele works then almost unknown in the United States. He drew up a will in 1925 leaving the collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He died on 9 July 1982 in Edgartown, Massachusetts, at 93, and roughly four hundred items from his collection entered the Met by bequest; this lithograph was accessioned in 1984, the ordinary administrative gap between a bequest taking effect and an individual object being formally catalogued.

No source consulted here documents when, from whom, or through which dealer Thayer acquired this specific print. His main buying window for works on paper, 1921 to 1923, would place any purchase roughly a quarter-century after the print was pulled, but that is inference from his general collecting pattern, not a documented transaction for this object, and it is recorded here as an open question rather than a fact.

An open-access status that contradicts itself

Wikimedia Commons hosts a photograph of this exact sheet, donated to Commons by the Metropolitan Museum of Art itself as part of the museum's own open-access programme, dedicated under a CC0 waiver with no rights reserved. That donation is dated in the file's own record to 2017. The Metropolitan Museum's current public collection database, queried directly for this object in the course of researching this record, returns the field 'isPublicDomain' as false for the same accession number.

Both statements come from the museum itself, at different points in time, and this record does not attempt to adjudicate between them. It states the conflict plainly so that a reader relying on either fact alone is warned that the other one exists.

The market for the edition, and the sale that is not this object

No auction transaction is documented for the Met's own sheet; it entered the collection by bequest, not by purchase, and nothing in the sources consulted suggests it was ever offered for sale before or after Thayer owned it.

For comparison only, and explicitly not this object: a black-and-white impression of the same 1895 lithograph, carrying the same title and full German inscription, with a documented line of descent from Olaf Schou, a Norwegian industrialist and one of Munch's principal patrons who is recorded as having acquired it from the artist's circle around 1900, then by descent through his brother Christian Schou to the consignors, was offered at Sotheby's London, Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, 21 June 2016, lot 6, estimated at 800,000 to 1,200,000 pounds. The hammer or final sold price for that lot was not found in the sources consulted for this record.

Separately, and far more widely reported in the press, an entirely different 1895 object in an entirely different medium, a pastel on board that had remained in private hands and out of public view for decades, sold at Sotheby's New York on 2 May 2012 for 119,922,600 dollars including buyer's premium, a record at the time for any work of art at auction. That pastel is not a print, is not this lithograph, and remains in a private collection. It shares only a year and a motif with the object described in this record.

Theft, and why it does not touch this object

The Scream motif has been physically stolen twice, and both thefts targeted paintings, not prints. On 12 February 1994, during the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, two thieves climbed a ladder into the National Gallery in Oslo and cut the 1893 painted Scream from its mount; the museum refused a one-million-dollar ransom demand, and the painting was recovered undamaged on 7 May 1994. On 22 August 2004, two armed men entered the Munch Museum in daylight, pulled the museum's painted Scream from the wall and took the painting Madonna on their way out; both were recovered in 2006, the Scream with moisture damage to one corner and Madonna with tears and two holes.

Both stolen works were unique paintings, each irreplaceable in a way no single sheet from a print edition of thirty to forty-five impressions can be. This lithograph, including the Met's sheet, was in New York for both events and was never involved in either theft. The two thefts belong in this record only as evidence of how famous and how vulnerable the painted image had become by the 1990s and 2000s, a fame this print helped build by putting the composition into private homes decades earlier, but they are not part of this object's own history.

Condition, display, and what is not documented

No conservation or condition report for this specific sheet was found in the sources consulted. The Metropolitan Museum's public collection record associates the object with gallery number 099 as of the API query made for this record; works on paper in the Drawings and Prints department are conventionally rotated on and off view to limit light exposure rather than kept on permanent display, so a gallery number recorded today should not be read as a permanent location. No exhibition history for this specific sheet, at the Met or on loan elsewhere, was found in the sources consulted.