The Supermodel and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics from the World of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson

Author:Don Thompson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-05-26T18:30:00+00:00

I thought I should make something—I felt it would be so easy—it would take form under my hands like magic. Then people would see! . . . People would understand the significance, the power of it. They would remove their hats like they do in church.

—Edvard Munch, artist

God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else, it would be an awfully boring world.

—Alfred Taubman, former controlling shareholder of Sotheby’s

What better way to illustrate the theater of the auction process than with the story of the most expensive work ever put under the hammer? In May 2012 Edvard Munch’s The Scream was offered as lot 20 at Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York. One of the best-known images in modern art, it was consigned by Petter Olsen, a Norwegian real estate developer and shipping heir whose father was both friend and patron of the artist.

When Munch created The Scream in 1895, he had just turned 30. He was penniless, a chain-smoking alcoholic recovering from a failed romance. He feared that he would be overtaken by the mental illness that he thought ran in his family. When he showed his earlier painting The Sick Child (1885), there was a media debate in Oslo on whether he was sane.

Munch wanted his painting to reflect psychological reality rather than visual experience. The Scream shows an androgynous figure beside a hill in Ekeberg, a district in Oslo, with a bridge in the background, framed by a blood-colored sky (another version illustrated). The figure grasps its cheeks in dread.

At the bottom of the hill is the “madhouse” where Munch’s sister Laura was confined for schizophrenia. Down the street from the madhouse is a slaughterhouse. It is said that from the hill one could hear both the cries of mentally disturbed patients and of animals being herded to slaughter. The bridge itself was a common suicide spot, the local equivalent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate. Many art historians say the work does not actually represent a scream, but rather a figure blocking out the screams around him.

Munch always refused to explain the painting; he sometimes repeated the warning, first put forward by an Oslo newspaper, that his work was so subversive, it could produce chicken pox. He created black-and-white lithographs of The Scream for European magazines and offered them for sale with the promise that the black-and-white version would not cause disease. That is hard to beat as an early example of an artist back story.

The Scream became one of the most recognizable images in art history and popular culture. It has been reproduced and commercialized more than any picture except Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The existential dread in the composition has been referenced by everyone from Andy Warhol to Homer Simpson, who called it “The face that launched 1,000 therapists.” Child actor Macaulay Culkin mimicked the open-mouthed expression of horror in promotional ads for the 1990 movie Home Alone.

Munch created four versions of The Scream between 1893 and 1910.

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