Edvard Munch, The Scream

Did you know that there is mysterious graffiti scribbled within a streak of the sky in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream (1893)? No one knows whether it was Munch himself who wrote it, or if a disgruntled visitor to one of his early exhibitions scribbled the pencil inscription onto the painting itself.

But the fact remains that, for whatever reason, Munch never removed it from his now famous painting, though he must have been aware of it. What does the graffiti say? In Norwegian: “Could only have been painted by a madman”.

Source Reinhold Heller, “‘Could Only Have Been Painted by a Madman’–Or Could It?”, Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul, New York: MoMA, 2006.