'The Scream' theft stuns Norway

A nationwide hunt was under way today for armed thieves who forced their way into a lightly guarded Oslo museum and ripped the Edvard Munch masterpiece The Scream and another painting from the wall as stunned visitors watched in shock.

Despite a large number of leads, police had not made any arrests 24 hours after the daring daylight raid at Oslo’s Munch Museum, which set off a debate about poor security at art museums in the Scandinavian country.

“It can only be with horror that you react to something like this,” Deputy Culture Minister Yngve Slettholm said, expressing shock over what he said was Norway’s first armed art theft.

“We can only hope they end up back at the Munch Museum.”

The Scream – a painting Munch made in four versions – depicts an anguished figure appearing to be screaming, or listening to a scream, while holding his hands to his head.

It was loaded into a waiting car along with another famous Munch work, Madonna. The getaway car and the picture frames were found by police in Oslo hours after the robbery.

“‘We are working with tips. Many tips are coming and have been all day ... It takes time to go through,” said Inspector Iver Stensrud, of the Oslo police, at a news conference.

He said there had been no word from the thieves about a possible demand for a ransom, and that there were no suspects.

“The paintings could just as well be in Oslo as anywhere else,” Stensrud said. “For me to say anything else would just be speculation.”

Stensrud said the getaway car had been filled with the powder from a fire extinguished to cover evidence, and that it could take days to clean up enough to find forensic evidence.

He declined to speculate on motives, but art experts said the paintings were probably stolen for ransom or as a “trophy” robbery to impress other criminals, since it would be virtually impossible to sell them anywhere because they are so well known.

The Munch works were not insured against theft, because it was impossible to set a price on them, said John Oeyaas, managing director of Oslo Forsikring, the city-owned company that insure the paintings against damage.

“It was a conscious decision,” he said. “These are irreplaceable, and insurance would mean nothing. The total loss of an irreplaceable item cannot be compensated ... In principle, these are artworks that are not possible to sell.”

However, he said the theft in broad daylight from one of Norway’s most visited museums raises the question of security -“How can we make these artworks available to the public while still securing them?”

It’s the second time in a decade that a version of the iconic painting has been stolen. Another version of The Scream was stolen from Oslo’s National Gallery in February 1994, but recovered three months later.

Slettholm, of the Culture Ministry, said it was impossible to totally protect artworks “unless we lock them in a mountain bunker”.

“It is food for thought that the spiral of violence has now reached the art world,” he said. “This is a first for Norway, and we can only be glad that no one was hurt.”

The stolen Madonna was painted in 1893-1894, and depicts an erotic madonna with a blood-red halo in a dark, swirling aura.

Munch, a Norwegian painter and graphic artist who worked in Germany as well as his home country, developed an emotionally charged style that was of great importance in the birth of the 20th century Expressionist movement.

He painted The Scream in 1893, and together with Madonna it was a part of his Frieze of Life series, in which sickness, death, anxiety, and love are central themes. He died in 1944 at the age of 80.