In 2004 the Edvard Munch paintings The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo. They’ve since been recovered, repaired and reinstalled. But look what’s going on over at the Nationalmuseet, which houses its own extraordinary collection of Munch paintings, including versions of The Scream and Madonna that are displayed behind glass shields. There’s a uniformed guard at the gallery door, who spends most of his time and energy enforcing the no-photography rule. The glass shields only draw attention to those two paintings so that visitors head straight for them, their cellphones cocked.
I don’t think the Munch theft was a crime of passion, because if it had been the thieves would have made away with the painter’s portrait of his sister Inger, or Puberty, or The Dance of Life, which get under the skin in a deeper, more unshakeable way. If I were to steal one painting it would be Four Girls on a Bridge, which charges an innocent subject with longing and dread. Munch was a masterful printmaker, and many of his paintings retain a strongly graphic quality – an energy in the line – that trumps modeling and space. His most poweful paintings, however, don’t employ line so much as molten streams of color. In some, like The Kiss, figures melt into one another. In Four Girls (and in Moonlight too) figures melt into everything around them. Here it is into the street, the bridge, and the sky. The world, and not just the figures, is charged with life.