Revealed who wrote the secret graffiti in Edvard Munch's 'The Scream'

The hidden inscription written in pencil read: “Only a madman could have done it.” A phrase that has historically sown a sea of ​​doubts about who wrote it, until now.

It was in 1904 when a Danish art critic, eleven years after Edvard Munch painted The Scream , discovered that among the red brushstrokes of the sky there was a tiny text that said “Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand”, something like “Only a madman could have done it”. And since then, of course, there have been endless theories about who had inscribed such a phrase on a masterpiece, whether it had been a detractor or Munch himself, who denied being its author, clarifying that he had left it as part of the painting because it was simply right.

A Norwegian restorer, the discoverer of the origin.

But now, a team led by Mai Britt Guleng, a restorer at the National Museum of Norway , has unravelled the mystery: the hidden inscription, which was made in pencil, was written by the author himself. And they have done so by comparing the handwriting of the aforementioned sentence, obtained through infrared radiation, with other handwritten notes by Munch himself, who is still being studied to see if he suffered from some kind of mental illness, possibly schizophrenia, as well as certain traumas that led him to become an alcoholic, a vice that caused him to hallucinate, as he himself acknowledged. “Illness, madness and death were the three angels who watched over my cradle and who accompanied me throughout my life,” he once said.

The famous phrase… a complaint from the artist in response to harsh criticism?

Another of the findings explained in the statement issued by the gallery is that the graffiti was not made in the same year as the painting , but later, possibly after the poor critical reception that The Scream received in 1895, during an exhibition in Kristiania (now Oslo). Afterwards, many of those present discussed the mental health of the artist, who would write in his own work one of the phrases that was said about his work.