Original subtitles

[Music]

it's an iconic work it's an image which

everyone knows

[Music]

it's one of the most well-known images

in our history second only to the mona

lisa

over a century has passed since edvard

monk painted the screen

whether you're holding it in your hands

or you're looking at it on the wall of a

museum it will tell you straight away

it's a masterpiece

but who was this troubled artist and how

did this image come to represent a

lifetime's work it was a fantastically

important picture to monk the kind of

central figure in his painting at that

time

it's something that has crossed

continence cultures everyone knows it

so why in recent years has it become

such an object of desire for enthusiasts

and thieves alike

[Music]

for as long as i can remember i have

suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety

which i have tried to express in my art

edvard monk was a troubled soul

as can clearly be seen in his paintings

he lived for many years in poverty and

his unusual and often frightening style

took a long time to be fully embraced by

the artistic community

we now know edward monk as

the creator of some of the most say a

resting haunting

expressionistic images of the 20th

century

probably the only well-known norwegian

artist of the late 19th and 20th century

he was an emotional artist and he worked

when the inspiration came enormously

influential on

german expressionism

today this scream is the most famous

painting but

for him

in his time when he produced it it was

just one painting he didn't thought okay

now i'm painting my most important work

[Music]

monk created his most iconic work the

scream early in his career

little did he know that it would come to

define his legacy and that it would be

the target of so very many thieves and

just how hard it would be to recover

edvard monk was born on the 12th of

december 1863 in the small village of

ardelsbrook his family moved to oslo

then known as christiania when he was

only two

monk had been born into a norwegian art

scene that had blossomed in recent

decades especially with the paintings of

norway's landscape by the celebrated

johann christian dahl

just like monk dahl had come from a very

modest norwegian background

however monk's chances of following in

dahl's footsteps and traveling the world

seemed very slim from the outset

i think his childhood was horrible his

mom died when he was four of tb so

presumably had spent the first four

years of his life listening to her cough

which got to be nice

edward did have a difficult childhood

there were a number of family tragedies

and two deaths there were quite a lot of

diseases in the family

caused by the climate by the bad house

his father brought the children up on a

mixture of hellfire damnation and edgar

allan poe so

i think that explains a lot about

monk's later life

[Music]

although he displayed early talent monk

would only find his artistic calling in

his late teenage years

his most influential teacher was

christian cook

one of the

great realistic and social critic

artists in norway

monk really got his radical breakthrough

in the middle of the 1880s with the

painting that thick child how he painted

this was totally uncommon he was like

scrapping the color with knives and

there are really a lot of layers in this

uh painting it really divided the public

opinion

there is

undoubtedly an edge of darkness from his

work from the very beginning it's there

all along he was someone who was living

on the borderlines of sanity and

insanity

[Music]

many of monk's paintings from this era

in his career are missing

it's possible that they may have been

confiscated by his overtly pious father

who was covering his son's expenses yet

disapproved of his new direction

but edvard had a chance to break out on

his own

mooc was actually born into a family

where they had

several quite well-known artists one of

them was an artist called fritz taulom

and he

had close links to paris was quite well

known in paris and he sponsored

monk to go for the first time

and he went

into the studio of leon bonnell who was

pretty traditional painter and they

quite quickly came to blows i think he

immediately knew that he found it

stifling he found it dull

leonbona's style of painting may not

have been to mug's taste but he did

appreciate his tours of the parisian

galleries

paris was right in the middle of the

bell epoch and the work of many of the

greatest artists of the era was on show

one of them already toulouse-lautrec had

also been a student of leon bonner

edvard monk was stunned by what he saw

paris of course wasn't this time the

mecca the magnet for all artists they

had to go there they had to see what is

happening here he made two big trips to

paris the first time he came back having

seen impressionism he'd seen monet and

manet

but it's really the second trip when he

finds gauguin van gogh pre-expressionist

if you

like following the death of van gogh in

1890 there was the big retrospective in

1891 which undoubtedly he related to is

an artist who is

projecting emotion through colour

through lying through expression in art

paris at the time was sort of a

marketplace of various

uh painterly styles after impressionism

and i think

although he experiments with a lot of

things from paris and is indeed keen to

show his knowledge of impressionist

painting for instance we don't see him

really catching on to one

truly parisian way of of painting mung

always wanted to be a kind of parisian

artist because this was a center but he

got a lot of friends and supporters in

berlin and in other german cities like

hamburg lubeck grayson and so on so he

was more or less

20 years in germany

monk would have his greatest

breakthrough in berlin

he tried to model his works on what he'd

seen in paris trying out the

impressionist style the realist style

even painting in the puente list style

of george serra

but berlin was where he found his true

voice

painting picture by picture

i followed the impressions my eye took

in at heightened moments i painted only

memories adding nothing

no details that i did not see

hence the simplicity of the paintings

their emptiness

monk loved berlin i think he really

found his place there he found people

who were

willing to listen to him who saw him as

a proponent of new ideas

and in 1892 he had been asked to come

over with 35 works and do an exhibition

for the association of berlin artists

the berlin arts association at that time

was a very conservative circle of

artists

and i don't think anyone expected what

monk brought to the show

so within a week the show

was closed down he

thought he was an anarchist i think so

the ferrari themselves the the club just

thought he was nuts

um critics went wild and of course he

loved it he thought it was fantastic he

said i've never had so much fun or words

of that effect this made him a real hero

for the younger generation someone to

look up to and someone who was

breaking the norm and paving the way for

them immediately a lot of invitations

from other cities in germany for

exhibitions and monk hired an own room

only some months later in berlin to make

his private exhibition there so in 1893

the stream was exhibited the first time

in berlin

one evening i was walking along a path

the city was on one side and the fjord

below

i felt tired and ill

i stopped and looked over the fjord

the sun was setting and the clouds

turning blood red

i sensed a scream passing through nature

it seemed to me that i heard the scream

i painted this picture

painted the clouds as actual blood the

colour shrieked

this became the scream

we have these four versions two

paintings two pastels but they're also

wood cuts with also drawings so we have

a kind of family orbiting this theme i

think it's now generally

accepted that the pastel 1893 version

was the first and possibly a study for

the painting well the pastel that we

have here is executed in what appears to

be haste

with crayon onto ungrounded cardboard

this is a rather rough

expression

1895

he had a german collectors called otto

von farkid he did buy despair and tried

to buy the painted 1893 version

and it was a fantastically important

picture to monk you know he didn't want

to sell it and so he said to him i i'll

sell you the spirit and i'll make you a

new screen

this one stands out because of its frame

so it has a very special frame in which

he had inscribed almost a poem which

reflected his vision the 1910 version he

needed to replace the 1893 version

because it had gone and so he did

himself one in in tempura on card and

you know

this is a sign of how important it was

to him as a kind of central figure in in

his painting at that time they're all

sort of quite different in both

technique

uh and style and also to a certain

extent content the colouring is

different

in each of them some of them are more

highly colored the slight differences in

the compositions and interestingly if

you look at the eyes they're also

depicted slightly differently

i think in a certain point of his life

he saw that the scream is a very very

special very strong composition but when

he painted it it was just one part of

this

work in progress called freeze of life

there's of course this famous

poem-like text which is older than the

painting where he is writing about

walking with the two friends along the

sea and then suddenly

the sky is turning red and he's hearing

a big scream through nature i mean it

has been suggested his sister laura was

in a lunatic asylum at what has been

identified as that point of the fjord

and that he might have been walking to

see her and you know that

maybe didn't cheer him up while it is

personal and he states this

haunting moment in his life it's also

very

universal it's something that everyone

can relate to it's not him in the

picture it is

just a figure

[Music]

it may have just been a figure but it

became an icon

and it would catch the attention of

daring thieves masked gunmen and the

world's richest art collectors

edward monks the scream would not only

become the work he would be most known

for it would become an iconic piece of

art

unfortunately in 1994 it also became a

prime target for a gang of norwegian

thieves

it was the lily hammer olympics all eyes

on the country and at the same time as

the olympics there's also a kind of

cultural

olympics going on a focus on the

cultural world of norway and of course

the scream would sit at the centre of

that one of their most iconic images and

actually one of the most iconic images

in the world

i remember watching the evening news and

that sunday the first day of the winter

olympics

there was not so much news about the

olympics but the theft from the oslo

national gallery

literally ran in and within 20 seconds

had cut the painting taken it from the

wall snipped the wire and gone and they

left a note saying thank you for your

terrible security

charlie hill is an art detective who

just a year before the scream was stolen

had recovered another stolen masterpiece

in antwerp for mia's lady writing a

letter

an english criminal who had been

arrested in norway in a drugs matter

went into the norwegian embassy here in

london and said that he could get the

picture back for five million

because he knew the people who'd done it

so the norwegian chief of detectives

came across

and interviewed this guy

charlie hill would need a perfect cover

to pull off a sting to reclaim the

scream the thieves needed to believe

that he was willing to cough up some

serious dough to get the painting back

and the big spending getty museum were

happy to oblige

one of the detective sergeants flew to

california

and brought back

a massive

material to

identify me as a member of the getty

museum and then i used that

to persuade the criminals when i got to

oslo that i was a kosher getty museum

employee and it was part of the pretense

but it worked and it worked well because

the getty were happy with it

under a false name of chris roberts

charlie hill got in contact with the

suspects in oslo

following a long drawn-out period of

negotiations charlie hill ventured out

to a location 70 miles outside the city

to hopefully bring this complicated plan

of recovery to a brilliant conclusion

he said to me as we went in but it's

down there in the basement

and

they pulled the carpet back and there

was a trap door

the in the kitchen down

and i just flew at him and told him no

i'm not going down there to sit down

there until next christmas you're going

down there and it's there you bring it

back up

and he came up and there he had a

picture

in a blue sheet and he laid it down

and flipped it back and i'll be damned

as it turned out it was the back of the

picture but monk had started it already

and then i turned it over and i knew

straight away it was the right picture

because the thing about a masterpiece is

it will tell you it's a masterpiece

whether you're holding it in your hands

or you're looking at it

on the wall of a museum or wherever

you're behind glass and a big frame it

will tell you straight away it's a

masterpiece

the scream had been recovered but legal

complications meant that the

perpetrators of the theft were able to

walk free

then ten years after the first theft

another version of the scream was taken

this time in broad daylight

in 2004 the monk museum's version of the

scream was also stolen on this occasion

by armed

thieves who rushed in and forced their

way in and took the scream and another

important painting madonna well they

meant business they used guns um the

picture was missing for over two years

well it's interesting that two separate

versions of the scream were both stolen

in oslo i mean they're both such iconic

paintings and also extremely valuable

financially so they were attempting

targets for thieves the very thing that

makes it

so stealable of course stops anybody

being able to steal it which is its fame

i would think bravado and stupidity

would be two good reasons why he might

try to steal it

both this version of the scream and the

madonna painting were recovered in 2006

but we know far less about how this

police operation went down

the next time that the screen would make

international headlines was in 2012 when

the least scene of the versions of the

painting sold at auction for an

astonishing 120 million dollars

[Music]

this particular version had been in the

family of a norwegian businessman peter

wilson for many many years and his

family had been neighbours

of monk and turned out to be patrons

friends

so it's not one that had been seen it

had been hidden from view in the same

place which always makes value shoot up

it was the most expensive painting which

had ever been sold at that time but of

course you only need two people at

auction

who want a painting for it to push up

the value if you look at what's happened

to stock markets over the past 20 years

they've gone like that and if you look

at what's happened to the value of

gilt-edged you know blue chip a-list art

it's gone like that

just like with van gogh's sunflowers

monk's scream has come to symbolize the

artist

the two of them share many similarities

they both came to paris and were

inspired by the great artists of the

bell epoch especially paul gogan they

were both unstable characters who forged

their own artistic style but whereas

vincent van gogh died in 1890 munk lived

until old age

the first part of his life mung is

traveling all the time he's really

living from a suitcase a lot of

exhibitions a lot of parties a lot of

relations and so on

and then after his breakdown in 1908

he's coming back

to his home country he's buying a big

house a villa with a huge garden it's a

little bit above the town so he's

looking down on the city it's a very

remote place

my breakthrough came very late in life

only starting when i was 50 years old

but at that time i felt as though i had

the strength for new deeds and ideas

he became more and more isolated and

less involved with oslo society but most

importantly he continued to paint and he

did a magnificent series of

self-portraits he pinched himself again

and again and again and what he sees is

you know is disturbing and chilling i

think

monk may have wanted to live a reclusive

life but that became impossible with the

outbreak of world war ii

[Music]

in 1940 the germans invaded norway and

monk was very concerned that his work

would be confiscated by the nazis

because the germans had regarded his

paintings as degenerate all his works in

germany were confiscated from all the

museums they were sold in norway

or in switzerland

and moon didn't like it of course

82 pictures in german collections that

were all taken off walls

rather sweetly 71 of them are bought in

time by norwegian collectors and brought

back to norway which shows his status as

the living norwegian painter i think he

was very worried and he decided to give

his

leave his estate to the municipality of

oslo and that is the basis of the

collection in the monk museum where it's

just on view today

[Applause]

from my rotting body flowers shall grow

and i in them

and that is

eternity after monk's death the scream's

international reputation would grow and

grow

it is an extraordinary work of art it

represents

something in

western european and worldwide thought

at the turn of the 20th century there

was this terrific of apocalyptic fear

the

picture i think spoke very directly to

that fear

um it was a very new looking picture

it's crossed continents it's across

cultures

it's been on the simpsons to andy warhol

it's an image that we all know

covers of books and record sleeves and

we see all the accretions of its

fame i think what is really well known

is the

face

of the person in the middle this person

who's screaming has become a sort of a

symbol of angst or

psychological disturbance this work

really shows

the basic fear of the human being so

everyone every visitor in this museum

can put his own feelings in this

painting so it's timeless

[Music]

[Music]

you