[국제]”Only crazy people…” The identity of the graffiti written in Munch’s’Scream’

Norwegian expressionist painter Edvar Munch’s work’Screams’ reveals the identity of the graffiti.

In the upper left corner of Munch’s masterpiece’Scream’, a strange sentence “Only crazy people can draw” is written in small pencil. Experts have been investigating whether someone has damaged the work or whether the artist himself wrote this sentence.

According to the BBC on the 22nd, the Norwegian National Gallery recently revealed that the phrase was written by Munch.
The museum said that the results of examining the handwriting of the picture and the handwriting of the diary left by Munch were completely similar, and it was highly likely that Munch had added additional letters after completing the work.

“Undoubtedly, Munch’s graffiti,” said National Museum of Art curator Mybrid Gullen.

The’Scream’ is a work from 1893, but the museum is highly likely to have written this graffiti in 1895, when the work was first exhibited. When’Scream’ was first released, the work received sharp criticism from both the art and medical worlds. At the time, Henrik Grosch, head of the Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, commented on Munch’s paintings: “You can no longer think of Munch as a serious person with a normal brain.”

Munch was greatly hurt by the criticism of mentioning mental illness at the time and mentioned it several times in his memo and diary. The National Museum of Art believes that Munch may have added the phrase to the painting in the process.

Munch lost his beloved mother and older sister as a child, and both grandfather, father, and younger brother suffered from mental illness. As a result, he suffered chronic depression, and in 1908 was hospitalized for nervous breakdowns.

Based on his mental world, Munch expressed the source of existence and negative emotions such as loneliness, jealousy, and anxiety.

YTN PLUS Reporter Jeong Yoon-joo
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