Munch Madness - The Biggest Bid

Edvard Munch in 1912
(Photo: Anders Beer Wilse/Wikimedia Commons)

As was widely reported yesterday, an original pastel version of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's (1863-1944) "The Scream" was auctioned off on May 2 for a record-breaking $119.92 million at Sotheby's in New York.

"Not even Sotheby’s specialists expected such a figure," The New York Times' Souren Melikian wrote on May 3. "The estimate quoted to me the day before by Simon Shaw, head of the New York department, was $80 million, plus the sale charge."

The Daily Beast meanwhile has  compiled a photo gallery of some of the most expensive works of art ever sold. 

The Scream is an iconic image that is arguably one of the most famous paintings in the world. (The version sold at auction in New York was reportedly one of four original versions of this same subject. So far, it would seem, the buyer appears to prefer to remain anonymous.)

Munch, who was by all accounts a melancholy man who found it hard to approach women (his "Madonna" paintings depict some of the temptation mixed with trepidation he may have felt vis-a-vis the opposite sex), spent some time in the northern German city of Lübeck (my father's hometown) and joined the German Expressionist movement, although he is more often - and perhaps more accurately - referred to as a Symbolist painter and an important forerunner of Expressionism.

Munch autograph  (Photo: scanned from book/Wikimedia Commons)

One cannot help but wonder whether Munch himself could have ever imagined one of his works of art fetching the highest price ever at auction in the early 21st century?

I have a book about Munch in German somewhere in my apartment in Washington, D.C. I purchased it on an outing more than a decade ago when I lived and worked at a newspaper in Frankfurt for a few years. A German guy I was dating at the time kindly accepted my suggestion to visit an art museum in Bonn, where I bought this lovely little hardcover book about Munch. I was more preoccupied with the emotional distance of my teutonic beau at the time ... Methinks this dramatic Munch sale might be a reason to dust off this old volume and actually read it. (I must confess that I love art books, but often spend more time looking at the plates ie images in them versus reading all the text. A French-American man I knew during my college days in Montreal, Canada, for instance, gave me a softcover art book about Franz Marc - in French, I might add - in a bid to boost my good, but not totally fluent, French language skills. I have yet to read that volume cover to cover, but have looked at the Marc paintings many times over!)