BREAKING NEWS: Munch's "The Scream", "Madonna" Stolen At GunPoint

BREAKING NEWS: Munch’s “The Scream”, “Madonna” Stolen At GunPoint From Musuem Sunday Morning

The Scream, stolen this morn­ing from the National Art Museum in Oslo. 

This morn­ing in Oslo, Norway thieves stole Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” and “Madonna” at gun­point. The dar­ing rob­bery occured dur­ing the muse­um’s busi­ness hours in full view of patrons and employees.

Munch paint­ed four ver­sions of “The Scream” in dif­fer­ent media. Stolen this morn­ing was the tem­pera and pas­tel on board. It and “Madonna” car­ry a com­bined val­ue of $74 mil­lion USD.

Compiled from var­i­ous news sources:

Two thieves threat­ened a female secu­ri­ty guard before leav­ing with [“The Scream”] and anoth­er [paint­ing] titled “Madonna.” An accom­plice wait­ed out­side in a car dur­ing the 11:10 a.m. raid, said Jorn Jorgenson, a spokesman for the Oslo police.

“The Scream’ has come more and more to be accept­ed as Edvard Munch’s most sig­nif­i­cant motif,” accord­ing to the Web site of the Munch Museum, where today’s rob­bery occurred. The work “depicts the sym­bol of mod­ern man, for whom god is dead and for whom mate­ri­al­ism pro­vides no solace.” (Bloomberg)

“No one has been phys­i­cal­ly injured, and the sus­pects escaped in an Audi A6. We are search­ing for the sus­pects with all avail­able means,” Walsoe told The Associated Press. “We found the escape car, and we have found many pieces of the frames.” (Associated Press) 

Some muse­um vis­i­tors pan­icked, think­ing they were being attacked by terrorists.

“He was wear­ing a black face mask and some­thing that looked like a gun to force a female secu­ri­ty guard down on the floor,” vis­i­tor Marketa Cajova told NTB pub­lic radio.
Radio pro­duc­er Castang told France Inter radio: “What’s strange is that in this muse­um, there weren’t any means of pro­tec­tion for the paint­ings, no alarm bell. 

“The paint­ings were sim­ply attached by wire to the walls. All you had to do is pull on the paint­ing hard for the cord to break loose ‑which is what I saw one of the thieves doing.” 

Castang said police arrived on the scene 15 min­utes lat­er. Visitors were ush­ered into the muse­um’s cafe­te­ria. (Canadian Press)

“They knew exact­ly where the paint­ings were and took them down from the wall,” Jorunn Christophersen, head of infor­ma­tion for the Munch Museum, told CNN.

She dis­put­ed a report that the paint­ings were unguard­ed, say­ing an alarm sound­ed after they pulled the paint­ings off the wall.

“There is an alarm sys­tem and [the paint­ings] are stuck to the wall with sol­id screws but they have just used force in tak­ing the Munch [paint­ings] away,” she said. (CNN)

There are four ver­sions of The Scream. The Munch Museum had two of them, a pri­vate col­lec­tor owns the third and the fourth is on dis­play at Oslo’s National Gallery. 

“They were all paint­ed by Munch, and they are all just as valu­able,” muse­um spokes­woman Jorunn Christoffersen said. “Still, these paint­ings are not pos­si­ble to sell, and it is impos­si­ble to put a price tag on them.” (Canadian Press)

It was the sec­ond time in 10 years that “The Scream” has been stolen. Another, and per­haps better-known ver­sion, of the paint­ing was tak­en from Norway’s National Gallery in a break-in in February 1994, on the open­ing day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. 

A $1 mil­lion ran­som was refused by the gov­ern­ment, but the pic­ture, which is on frag­ile paper, was retrieved undam­aged near­ly three months lat­er and remains in that gallery. Three Norwegians were arrested. 

The oth­er two ver­sions are in stor­age at the Munch Museum. 

Munch, who lived from 1863 to 1944 and who was a founder of mod­ern expres­sion­ism, made sev­er­al copies of his key works, includ­ing “The Scream.” He paint­ed the work in 1893, as part of his “Frieze of Life” series, in which sick­ness, death, anx­i­ety and love are cen­tral themes. (Washington Post)