Art by Edvard Munch

Munch's childhood was defined almost entirely by death: his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, his favorite sister Sophie died of the same disease when he was fourteen, and another sister was later institutionalized for mental illness. He once wrote that illness, insanity, and death were the black angels that stood watch over his cradle, and that darkness runs through nearly everything he painted afterward. He made four separate versions of The Scream between 1893 and 1910, in crayon, paint, pastel, and tempera, and one theory, from art historian Robert Rosenblum, suggests the screaming figure's face was inspired by a mummified Peruvian body Munch may have seen exhibited in Paris around the same time.

The 1893 version carries a strange bit of graffiti scratched into its upper corner reading "Could only have been painted by a madman," long assumed to be vandalism until 2021 infrared scans confirmed the handwriting was Munch's own. The painting has been stolen twice, once in 1994 during the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, with a note left behind thanking the museum for its poor security, and again in 2004 at gunpoint; both times it was recovered. A 1895 pastel version sold in 2012 for $119.9 million, briefly the most expensive artwork ever auctioned. In 2026, researchers in Norway used X-ray mapping and accelerated aging chambers to model exactly how light and humidity are degrading the painting's original pigments, building a tool that predicts what it will look like three centuries from now, work now shaping how the museum controls its lighting.