Edvard Munch: The Krakatoa Sky, the Hidden “Madman” Inscription, and the $119.9 Million Scream

Last updated: May 2026 · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin

Edvard Munch (12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) is the most psychologically intense and most proto-Expressionist major artist in Western art history, and the creator of The Scream — one of the most universally recognised images in the world, an image that has become the visual shorthand for modern anxiety, alienation, and existential dread. The Scream is so familiar that it has become a meme, an emoji, an inflatable toy. And yet the biographical and scientific facts behind it are far more specific and far stranger than its meme-status suggests: a probable real meteorological event behind the blood-red sky; a hidden inscription confirmed in 2021 to be in Munch’s own hand; four versions; two dramatic thefts; a $119.9 million sale. At the Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo and the Munch Museum, Oslo. DeckArts Berlin from ~$140.

Early Life: Death, Illness, and the Family

Edvard Munch was born on 12 December 1863 in Loten, Norway, the second of five children. His early life was dominated by illness and death — the specific biographical experiences that shaped the psychological intensity of his mature work. His mother, Laura Catherine Bjolstad, died of tuberculosis in 1868, when Munch was five years old. His older sister Sophie, to whom he was very close, died of tuberculosis in 1877, when Munch was 13 — a death that affected him profoundly and that he returned to repeatedly in his art (most directly in The Sick Child, of which he made multiple versions). Munch himself was a sickly child, frequently ill and kept out of school.

His father, Christian Munch, was a military doctor with intensely religious, even morbid, convictions; after his wife’s death he became increasingly anxious and religiously preoccupied, and Munch later described his father’s temperament as bordering on the pathological. Munch wrote: “Illness, insanity, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.” Mental illness ran in the family — his sister Laura suffered from mental illness, and Munch himself feared and eventually experienced mental breakdown. This specific biographical context — the early deaths of his mother and beloved sister, the morbid religiosity of his father, the family history of mental illness, and his own anxious, fearful temperament — is the direct source of the psychological intensity that distinguishes Munch’s art from all the more decorative or formally-focused movements of his period.

The Scream: The Walk, the Anxiety, the Diary Entry

The Scream (Norwegian: Skrik, also translated as The Shriek; the first version 1893) depicts a figure on a bridge or walkway, hands pressed to its head, mouth open in a scream (or, in another reading, hands pressed to its ears to block out a scream coming from nature), against a landscape with a violently coloured blood-red and orange sky over a blue-black fjord. The figure is reduced to a wavering, skull-like, almost sexless form; the lines of the landscape and sky undulate in sympathy with the figure’s distress.

Munch recorded the specific experience that inspired The Scream in a diary entry. He described walking along a road at sunset with two friends; he felt tired and ill; the sun was setting and the clouds turned “blood red.” He wrote (in the most commonly cited translation): “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.” The crucial point of Munch’s account: the screaming figure in the painting is not screaming. The scream is coming from nature — from the blood-red sky, from the landscape itself — and the figure is reacting to it, perhaps covering its ears against the overwhelming scream of nature. The Scream is not a picture of a person screaming; it is a picture of a person overwhelmed by a scream that passes through the natural world. This is the specific reading that the diary entry establishes and that the title (which refers to the scream of nature, not the figure) confirms.

The Krakatoa Sky: A Real Meteorological Event

The most specific scientific theory about The Scream concerns the blood-red sky. In 2004, a group of astronomers at Texas State University (led by Donald Olson, who specialises in using astronomy to date and explain artworks and historical events) proposed that the violently red sky in The Scream was based on a real meteorological phenomenon that Munch witnessed: the spectacular twilight skies caused by the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa in August 1883.

The Krakatoa eruption — one of the most violent volcanic events in recorded history — ejected enormous quantities of ash and aerosols into the upper atmosphere, where they spread around the globe and produced vivid, intensely coloured twilight skies (deep reds, oranges, and purples) across the Northern Hemisphere for months afterward, into the winter of 1883–1884. These extraordinary skies were widely reported and recorded across Europe, including in Norway. The Texas State team argued that Munch, walking near Oslo (then Kristiania) in the winter of 1883–1884, would have seen exactly the kind of blood-red twilight sky that the Krakatoa aerosols produced, and that this real meteorological experience — recalled and transformed years later — is the specific source of The Scream’s sky. The theory is debated (Munch painted The Scream in 1893, ten years after Krakatoa, and the relationship between his memory and the painting is not certain), but it provides a specific scientific candidate for the real-world origin of the most famous sky in modern art: a sky coloured by a volcano on the other side of the world. See: Best Art for Dark Rooms 2026.

The Hidden Inscription: Confirmed Munch’s Hand in 2021

One of the four versions of The Scream (the 1893 painting in the Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo) bears a tiny, barely-visible pencil inscription in the upper-left corner, in Norwegian: “Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand” — “Can only have been painted by a madman.” For many years, the inscription’s origin was uncertain: was it written by an offended viewer (a vandal) reacting to the disturbing painting, or by Munch himself?

In 2021, the Nasjonalmuseet conducted an infrared and handwriting analysis of the inscription and concluded that it was written by Munch himself. The handwriting matches Munch’s own hand (compared with his diaries and letters), and the analysis suggested it was added by Munch probably in 1895, after the painting was first exhibited and publicly criticised — in particular after a discussion at a meeting of the Kristiania student society in 1895, where a medical student publicly questioned Munch’s mental health on the basis of the painting. Munch, deeply hurt by the public suggestion that he was mad, appears to have added the inscription to his own painting as a bitter, defiant, self-aware response: “Can only have been painted by a madman.” The most famous image of modern anxiety carries a hidden inscription, in the artist’s own hand, responding to the public accusation of his own madness. The 2021 confirmation transformed the inscription from an ambiguous mark into a specific, dated, biographical statement by Munch about the reception of his own work. See: Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo.

Four Versions, Two Thefts, $119.9 Million

Munch made four versions of The Scream between 1893 and 1910, in different media: two painted versions (tempera and crayon/pastel on cardboard) and two in pastel, plus a lithograph (1895) that allowed the image to be reproduced and disseminated widely. The four versions are held in the Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo), the Munch Museum (Oslo), and — the 1895 pastel version — in private hands.

The thefts: The Scream has been stolen twice. (1) In 1994, the version in the Nasjonalgalleriet (Oslo) was stolen on the opening day of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics; the thieves left a note reading “Thanks for the poor security.” It was recovered a few months later in a sting operation. (2) In 2004, the version in the Munch Museum (Oslo) was stolen in a violent armed daylight robbery (along with Munch’s Madonna); both paintings were recovered in 2006, with some damage to The Scream that was subsequently conserved.

The $119.9 million sale: In May 2012, the 1895 pastel version of The Scream (the only one in private hands, owned by the Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, whose father had been a friend and patron of Munch) was sold at Sotheby’s New York for $119,922,500 — at the time, the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. The buyer was later revealed to be the financier Leon Black. The most famous image of human anxiety and alienation became one of the most expensive art objects in the world. See: The Scream at DeckArts.

The Frieze of Life: The Scream in Context

The Scream was not an isolated work but part of a larger cycle that Munch called The Frieze of Life (Livsfrisen) — a series of paintings on the themes of love, anxiety, and death that he worked on throughout his career and exhibited together in various configurations. The Frieze of Life included The Scream, Madonna, Vampire (also called Love and Pain), The Dance of Life, Anxiety, Jealousy, Ashes, The Sick Child, and other works exploring the full cycle of human emotional and existential experience.

The Frieze of Life’s programme: Munch sought to create a comprehensive visual exploration of the fundamental human experiences — the awakening of love, the intensity and pain of sexual relationships, jealousy and betrayal, anxiety and dread, illness and death. The Scream occupies the position of the most extreme expression of existential anxiety within this cycle. Understanding The Scream as part of the Frieze of Life clarifies its meaning: it is not a depiction of a specific incident or a specific emotion but a contribution to a systematic exploration of the universal structure of human emotional experience — the Expressionist programme of depicting the inner psychological reality rather than the external visible world. Munch is the most direct precursor of German Expressionism (Die Brücke, founded in Dresden in 1905, took Munch as a primary influence), and the Frieze of Life is the foundational document of the Expressionist project.

The Breakdown and the Late Work

Munch’s intense, anxious temperament, his heavy drinking, and the emotional turbulence of his relationships (particularly a traumatic affair that ended in 1902 with an incident in which a gun was discharged and Munch lost part of a finger) led to a serious mental and physical breakdown in 1908. He entered a clinic in Copenhagen run by Dr Daniel Jacobson, where he was treated for approximately eight months with rest, diet, and the electrotherapy of the period.

The specific consequence of the breakdown: after his recovery in 1909, Munch’s art changed significantly. He returned to Norway, settled eventually at Ekely (an estate near Oslo where he lived in increasing isolation for the rest of his life), and produced a large body of late work that was generally brighter in colour, calmer in mood, and more concerned with landscape, agricultural labour, and the natural world than the intense psychological dramas of the Frieze of Life period. The late Munch is less famous than the Frieze of Life Munch, but it represents the recovery and the long, productive, calmer final decades of an artist who had feared he would succumb to the family history of mental illness and instead lived and worked into his 80s.

Degenerate Art: The Nazis and the Bequest to Oslo

Munch had a strong connection to Germany (he lived and worked in Berlin in the 1890s, where his work caused a famous scandal — the “Munch Affair” of 1892, when his exhibition at the Verein Berliner Künstler was forced to close after a week amid controversy, an event that paradoxically made him famous in Germany and contributed to the founding of the Berlin Secession). His work was widely collected in German museums in the early 20th century.

Under the Nazi regime, Munch’s work — modernist, Expressionist, psychologically intense — was condemned as “degenerate art” (entartete Kunst). In 1937, the Nazis removed 82 of Munch’s works from German public collections as part of the purge of degenerate art. Munch, who was still living in occupied Norway (Germany occupied Norway from 1940), witnessed the Nazi condemnation of his life’s work and feared for the art he still held. He died at Ekely on 23 January 1944, aged 80, during the German occupation. In his will, he bequeathed his entire remaining estate — approximately 1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, 4,500 drawings, and his sculptures and personal effects — to the city of Oslo. This vast bequest formed the foundation of the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet), which opened in Oslo in 1963 and which holds the largest collection of his work in the world. The artist whose work the Nazis condemned as degenerate left his entire life’s output to his city. See: Munch Museum, Oslo.

Munch for Home Decor

The Scream single (~$140) is the most psychologically expressive and most universally recognised modern art in the DeckArts range. Its specific home decor qualities:

The expressive emotional register. The Scream is the supreme image of expressive emotional intensity — the visual shorthand for anxiety, alienation, and the modern psychological condition. For a person whose aesthetic identity is expressive, emotional, psychological, or proto-Expressionist, The Scream is the most specifically appropriate classical/modern art at DeckArts. It is not a calm, contemplative, or decorative image; it is an intense, vivid, emotionally direct statement.

The vivid sky palette. The blood-red, orange, and yellow sky (the probable Krakatoa sky) over the blue-black fjord is the most vivid and most chromatically dramatic palette in the DeckArts range. On warm white: the vivid sky advances dramatically. On forest green or warm charcoal: the dark fjord merges with the dark wall, and the vivid sky becomes the dominant chromatic event. The most dramatic single-deck chromatic statement at DeckArts.

Best positions: Study or creative workspace (the expressive companion to creative or intellectual work); a dark academic or expressive bedroom; a teenager’s room (for the teenager who identifies with expressive emotional art); a living room accent wall (warm white or forest green) for a home with a bold, expressive, or modern aesthetic identity. The Scream is best as a single statement piece rather than part of a quiet multi-piece programme — its emotional intensity requires its own visual space. View The Scream at DeckArts →

Four Complete Munch Programmes

Programme 1: The Expressive Study (~$140)
Warm white study walls + The Scream single (~$140) facing or beside the desk at 125–145 cm (seated eye level) + directed 2700K art spot. The probable Krakatoa sky; the 2021-confirmed inscription “Can only have been painted by a madman” in Munch’s own hand; $119.9 million in 2012. The most expressive companion to creative or intellectual work. Total art: ~$140.

Programme 2: The Dramatic Living Room Accent (~$140)
Forest green or warm charcoal accent wall + The Scream single (~$140) at 155–165 cm as the room’s single dramatic statement + warm 2700K directed spot + otherwise restrained furnishing (the emotional intensity requires visual space around it). The dark fjord merges with the dark wall; the vivid Krakatoa sky becomes the room’s dominant chromatic event. Total art: ~$140.

Programme 3: The Expressive Teenager’s Room (~$280)
Warm white or forest green walls + The Scream single (~$140) primary wall + Starry Night single (~$140) adjacent wall. Two Post-Impressionist/proto-Expressionist programmes: Munch’s scream of nature (Krakatoa sky; the inscription) + Van Gogh’s swirling asylum sky (Kolmogorov turbulence; the chrome yellow). For the teenager with an expressive, emotional, or psychological aesthetic identity. Total art: ~$280. See: Wall Art for a Teenage Girl’s Room 2026.

Programme 4: The Modern Anxiety Gallery (~$280)
Warm charcoal or forest green wall + The Scream single (~$140) + Saturn diptych (~$230, Goya, the dark devouring) in a gallery arrangement. Two images of existential dread: the proto-Expressionist scream of nature + the Romantic-Black-Painting horror. For a dark academic, expressive, or psychologically-themed interior. Total art: ~$370. See: Goya: Saturn Complete Guide.

FAQ

Who was Edvard Munch?

Edvard Munch (12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944): Norwegian painter and printmaker; the most psychologically intense major artist of his period and the most direct precursor of German Expressionism. His early life was dominated by death and illness (his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5; his beloved sister Sophie when he was 13). He created The Scream (first version 1893) as part of his Frieze of Life cycle. He suffered a mental breakdown in 1908 but recovered and lived to 80, producing a large, calmer body of late work. The Nazis condemned his work as “degenerate art” and removed 82 works from German collections in 1937. He bequeathed his entire estate (~1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, 4,500 drawings) to the city of Oslo, forming the Munch Museum (opened 1963). At the Nasjonalmuseet and Munch Museum, Oslo. DeckArts The Scream from ~$140.

Why is the sky red in The Scream?

The blood-red sky in The Scream was probably based on a real meteorological event. In 2004, astronomers at Texas State University (led by Donald Olson) proposed that the violently red, orange, and yellow sky reflects the spectacular twilight skies caused by the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa in August 1883, which ejected aerosols into the upper atmosphere that produced vivid coloured sunsets across the Northern Hemisphere (including Norway) for months. Munch recorded in his diary that he was walking at sunset when the clouds turned “blood red” and he “sensed a scream passing through nature” — the scream in the painting comes from nature, and the figure is reacting to it (perhaps covering its ears). The painting also bears a hidden pencil inscription, “Can only have been painted by a madman,” confirmed in 2021 to be in Munch’s own hand (probably added in 1895 after his mental health was publicly questioned). DeckArts The Scream from ~$140. See: The Scream at DeckArts.

Article Summary

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is the most psychologically intense major artist of his period and the most direct precursor of German Expressionism. Eight specific facts: (1) His early life was dominated by death and illness (mother died of TB when he was 5; sister Sophie when he was 13; family history of mental illness); (2) The Scream (first version 1893) depicts a figure reacting to a scream coming from nature (not the figure screaming), as Munch’s diary entry describes; (3) The blood-red sky was probably based on the real Krakatoa twilight skies of 1883–1884 (Texas State University, Donald Olson, 2004); (4) A hidden pencil inscription, “Can only have been painted by a madman,” was confirmed in 2021 to be in Munch’s own hand (probably added 1895 after his mental health was publicly questioned); (5) He made four versions; The Scream was stolen twice (1994 and 2004, both recovered); (6) The 1895 pastel sold for $119.9 million in 2012 (then the highest auction price ever); (7) The Scream is part of the Frieze of Life cycle exploring love, anxiety, and death — the foundational document of Expressionism; (8) The Nazis condemned his work as “degenerate art” (82 works removed 1937); he died in occupied Norway in 1944 aged 80 and bequeathed his entire estate (~1,000 paintings) to Oslo. DeckArts The Scream single (~$140): the most expressive emotional statement, on warm white or forest green. Ships from Berlin. 30-day return.

About the Author

Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of DeckArts and a creative director from Ukraine based in Berlin.

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