Edvard Munch’s The Scream is rare in a way that has nothing to do with how many people have seen it. It is arguably the most reproduced image in Western art, printed on mugs, phone cases and film posters by the million, yet as a physical object it exists in only four autograph versions, made by one man’s hand between 1893 and 1910. Two of those four have also, at different points, gone missing entirely, stolen from Norwegian museums in headline-grabbing raids ten years apart. The gap between the picture everyone owns a copy of and the object almost no one can ever own is where the real story of its rarity sits.
The image began, by Munch’s own account, on an evening walk above Kristiania, now Oslo, in early 1892, when he stopped on a bridge overlooking the fjord and felt what he later described in his diary as an infinite scream passing through nature. He turned that sensation into a painting for the first time the following year, unveiling it in Berlin in 1893 as the emotional climax of a larger cycle he called the Frieze of Life, a sequence of works exploring love, anxiety and death. The composition struck a nerve immediately, and Munch, who rarely let go of a subject that mattered to him, kept returning to it for the best part of two decades.
That habit of repetition is exactly why the picture is rare rather than unique. Munch made four finished versions in paint, tempera and pastel, plus a lithograph stone he used to print the image for wider sale, and it is the imbalance between those handful of originals and the flood of prints, thefts and record-breaking headlines they generated that this guide sets out to untangle.
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What makes Edvard Munch’s The Scream so rare?
Four works, not one
There is no single original Scream. Munch made two of the four core versions in 1893 alone: a fully worked tempera and crayon painting, now in the National Museum in Oslo, and a smaller study in pastel, held today by the Munch Museum. In 1895 he produced a second, more finished pastel for a German coffee merchant named Arthur von Franquet, and inscribed his original prose-poem about the fjord walk directly onto its frame in red paint. Around 1910 he returned to the subject one final time, painting a fourth version in tempera and oil for his own collection. That same year, 1895, he also cut a lithograph stone of the image, from which he and later printers pulled well over a hundred impressions, which is why prints of The Scream do turn up at auction with some regularity while the four originals almost never do.
Credit: edvardmunch.org
The night the Olympics upstaged a heist
The first version left the wall on 12 February 1994, the opening day of the Winter Olympics in nearby Lillehammer, when the world’s television cameras were pointed anywhere but Oslo. Two men leaned a ladder against the National Gallery, smashed a second-floor window and cut the 1893 painting free in under a minute, leaving behind a note thanking the museum for its poor security. A ransom demand followed a few weeks later; the gallery refused to pay it. The picture surfaced undamaged three months on, in May 1994, in a hotel room in the seaside town of Åsgårdstrand, recovered through a joint sting run by Norwegian police, Scotland Yard’s art squad and an undercover detective posing as a buyer for an American museum. Four men were eventually convicted in 1996.
Stolen again, this time at gunpoint
A decade later it happened again, only more brazenly. On 22 August 2004, two masked men walked into the Munch Museum in broad daylight, one of them carrying a handgun, and simply lifted the 1910 Scream and Munch’s Madonna off the wall in front of stunned visitors before driving away. No alarm sounded; the works were found to be secured only by wire. The paintings stayed missing for two years, prompting fears they had been destroyed, until Oslo police recovered both in August 2006. They came back damaged, with moisture staining on the Scream and tears to the Madonna, and spent roughly two years in conservation before returning to display. Three men were convicted over the robbery in 2006.
Credit: EuroNews
The only Scream anyone could actually buy
Of the four versions, three have always belonged to Norwegian public institutions and were never for sale at any price. The 1895 pastel is the exception. It descended privately through the family of shipping magnate Thomas Olsen, a friend and patron of Munch’s, and stayed there until Thomas’s son Petter Olsen consigned it to Sotheby’s in New York. On 2 May 2012, after a bidding contest that ran for close to fifteen minutes between two telephone buyers, it sold for £74 million, a new world record for any work of art at auction at the time, bought by the collector Leon Black. The price reflected not just the image but the object’s particular history: it is the only version with Munch’s handwritten poem on the frame, and, as Sotheby’s own catalogue for the sale put it, the only Scream that was ever going to leave Norway’s public collections at all.
What “rare” actually measures here
Put together, the arithmetic of scarcity is stark. Against a print run in the hundreds, there are only four originals, one in private hands and three in museums that have twice failed to keep them safe. Rarity here has nothing to do with fame and everything to do with how few times Munch’s own hand actually made the image.
Credit: Britannica
Why one man’s four attempts outweigh a century of copies
What the thefts and the sale share is a single fact: reproducibility never touched the value of the originals. A hundred lithographs did nothing to loosen the grip any one of the four autograph works holds over collectors, thieves and museums, because none can be substituted for another. Each carries its own surface, its own ownership history, and in the case of the 1895 pastel, Munch’s own handwriting.
That is also why the story keeps returning to Oslo. Three of the four versions remain bound to the city where Munch made them, protected now behind glass and metal detectors that did not exist before 2004, while the fourth sits in private hands, unlikely to be offered again for a very long time. Rarity, for The Scream, was never really about the picture. It was always about how few originals Munch left behind to protect.
