The Rescue Artist (11 page)

The abuse poured down even on paintings that would later be hailed as among Munch’s greatest. At one show, Munch reported with horror, he approached
The Sick Child
and found a rowdy crowd “laughing and shouting” in front of the depiction of his sister’s deathbed. Munch rushed outside, where one of his fellow artists, a then acclaimed and now forgotten figure, ran over and shouted in his face: “Humbug painter!” The critics were nearly as contemptuous. “The kindest service one can do for the painter E. Munch,” one wrote, “is to pass over his pictures in silence.”

From the beginning, though, a few viewers
did
understand what Munch was up to. In 1892, a group called the Association of Berlin Artists put on an exhibition of Munch’s work. The paintings were so controversial that they inspired a virtual civil war between an avant-garde faction of artists, who supported Munch, and a group of more conventional painters, who despised him. After only six days, the artists’ association voted to close the show down. A riot broke out. Munch’s reputation as an emblem of modernity was made.

The Scream
appeared the following year. Most viewers hated it. The impression it gave, according to one French newspaper, was that Munch had dipped a finger in excrement and smeared it around.

The painting grew out of an actual experience, though scholars quarreled over its date. Munch had set out for an evening stroll along the water, near Oslo. “I was walking along the road with two friends,” he recalled years afterward. “The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red.”

For years, Munch grappled with the memory of that sunset and labored to capture it in paint. The date of his evening walk has lately stirred a debate—1883 and 1886 and 1891 all have their partisans—because it now seems likely that poor Munch, his nerves already aflame, happened to witness one of the astonishing meteorological sights of all time. At 10:02 in the morning on August 27, 1883, half a world away from Norway, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa erupted. The island vanished from the earth, blasting itself apart into the heavens. Six cubic miles of rock, rendered into pumice and dust, rained down; smaller particles wafted high into the atmosphere. In the months to come, those floating particles drifted around the world and created sunsets that blazed and glowed with colors of an intensity and splendor no one had ever seen. The
New York Times
reported, on November 28, 1883, that “soon after five o’clock the western horizon suddenly flamed into a brilliant scarlet, which crimsoned sky and clouds. People in the streets were startled at the unwonted sight and gathered in little groups on all the corners to gaze into the west…. The clouds gradually deepened to a bloody red hue, and a sanguinary flush was on the sea.”

More stolid observers than Munch lost their bearings. In Poughkeepsie, New York, a team of firemen harnessed their horses to their pump wagon and raced toward the setting sun to fight the inferno on the horizon. In Oslo, on November 30, 1883, a newspaper reported that “a strong light was seen yesterday and today to the west of the city. People believed it was a fire: but it was actually a red refraction in the hazy atmosphere after sunset.”

Was this the sunset that Munch witnessed? Art historians have always attributed the appearance of the sky in
The Scream
to the combination of Norway’s vivid sunsets and Munch’s jangled nerves. (Some downplay Munch’s recollection and dismiss the question of literal sunsets altogether.) Now it seems that the detective work of two physicists and a professor of English may change that conventional wisdom.
^*

The scene impressed Munch so profoundly that he wrote several descriptions of his evening walk. “I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead-tired,” he recalled in 1892. “And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.”

That scream was destined to echo around the world. For Munch, it marked a personal, private terror. “For several years, I was almost mad—at that time the terrifying face of insanity reared up its twisted head,” he wrote later. “You know my picture
The Scream
. I was being stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood—I was at breaking point.”

Decades later,
The Scream
would achieve universal fame. No longer seen as an expression of one man’s torment, it was taken instead as a shriek of despair that might have come from almost anyone. Munch had felt panicky and overwhelmed. Half a century later, after the deaths of millions in two world wars and the threatened death, from atomic bombs, of everyone else, those feelings resonated across the globe. Pop trends—the rise of coffee-house existentialism, a taste for European gloom à la Bergman, rumors of the death of God—had made angst and alienation fashionable. In March of 1961,
Time
magazine hailed the new mood with a cover story entitled “Guilt and Anxiety.” The cover illustration?
The Scream
.

The Scream
was everywhere, reproduced endlessly in posters and also in such austere settings as psychology textbooks. This first round of fame was more or less straightforward, a kind of homage. But paintings and sculptures can become celebrities of a sort, famous for being famous, and when they do, we subject them to the same indignities that we inflict on other stars who have had the presumption to fly too high. We daub a mustache on the
Mona Lisa
, dress Michelangelo’s
David
in boxer shorts, transform the heartland figures of Grant Woods’s
American Gothic
into pitchmen for breakfast cereal.

For Edvard Munch, who was not a wry fellow, the fate of
The Scream
would have been a joke cruel beyond imagining. He had begun painting in the hope that his audiences would “understand the holiness” of his images. In time, the most famous of those images would adorn key rings and Halloween masks and, in Macaulay Culkin’s version, serve as the emblem for one of Hollywood’s biggest hits. The central figure of
The Scream
, one art historian proclaims, is now “the counterpart to the familiar smiley face.”

The Scream
was intended as one in a sequence of some two dozen paintings called
The Frieze of Life
. (The count is not exact because Munch worked on the project for more than three decades, and dropped, added, and revised various paintings along the way.) All the paintings dealt in some way with Munch’s favorite topics—sex, death, and alienation—but
The Scream
stands out from its fellows. In both emotion and technique, it is Munch’s rawest work.

All the other paintings that make up
The Frieze of Life
are painted in oil on canvas.
The Scream
combines tempera, in essence poster paint, with pastel and chalk, and is painted not on canvas but on a sheet of ordinary, untreated cardboard. Munch worked and reworked the themes he took up in
The Scream
—the harrowing red-and-yellow sky and the other landscape features are nearly identical in his 1892 oil painting
Despair
, for example—but
The Scream
has an urgency that is almost painful. The famous central figure was sketched so hastily that we can see the cardboard peeking through the face.

For Charley Hill, such details were crucial. Recovering
The Scream
, if he could manage it, would be another tremendous coup, a triumph to savor for a lifetime. On the other hand, faked masterpieces were everywhere, and falling for one would be a career-killing blunder. Hill’s very first undercover case had turned on a fake old master, and he feared fraudsters more than thieves—fraudsters were smart and greedy, he believed, while thieves were merely greedy.

Hill needed to be familiar with all the standard questions that art historians mull over because he might find himself dealing with nasty characters, or with experts in their pay, who would not react well if they found that the Getty’s man seemed curiously ill-informed about art. This was detective work of a sort, and Hill enjoyed sifting through the expert opinions: is the central figure screaming, as it appears, or
hearing
a scream, as Munch’s description seems to indicate? Was he (she? it?) indeed modeled on an Incan mummy that Munch saw displayed in a natural history museum in Paris? What is the significance of the vertical red stripe at the painting’s right edge?

But more important than such hard-to-resolve issues were nuts-and-bolts questions about the condition of the painting that would help Hill determine whether he was dealing with the real thing. In one of the red bands along the sky, for instance, someone had taken a pencil and written, “This must have been painted by a madman.” The handwriting is not Munch’s. Perhaps a visitor at some early exhibition scribbled the comment. No one knows, but the message is a crucial test of authenticity.

Munch seems to have had second thoughts about the red vertical stripe, to cite another example. Midway along the painting’s right edge, he took a sharp knife to the stripe as if to cut it out, but then changed his mind and covered over the knife slit with a band of dark green paint.

Many of these identifying marks derived from Munch’s working habits, which were as strange as every other aspect of his life. (Terrified by a scream that he heard piercing nature, he was equally terrified by silence. He always kept the radio on while he painted, though he often left it between stations, hissing static.) If a painting wasn’t going well, Munch sometimes took a whip and beat it. He called the punishment “horse treatment” and believed that it improved the painting’s character.

In other ways, too, Munch treated his paintings as living creatures. He was not jealous of other painters, Munch maintained, but his paintings were jealous of other paintings and could not be exhibited near the work of other artists. He called his paintings his children and could hardly bear to sell them. But he was a capricious parent who was sometimes astonishingly careless with his own work. He built an open-air studio so that he could paint outdoors, summer and winter, and he left his paintings hanging exposed to the elements for years. “He would casually throw [his paintings] on the floor and trample all over them,” one art historian marvels, “or lay them like lids on a boiling pot of soup.”

Endlessly experimental, Munch painted on canvas and wood and cardboard, using brushes and palette knives and, occasionally, his fingers. He painted furiously, racing to capture the images in his head and working to exhaustion. At the end of one late-night session of working and reworking
The Scream
, he finally wearied and blew out the candle near his easel. The wax spattered onto the painting, and the white drips can be seen toward the bottom right corner to this day.

Munch blew out that candle in 1893. More than a century later, in the winter of 1994, Charley Hill read about that wax and beamed with delight. What was the name of the Italian scientist who had proved you can’t blow out a candle the same way twice? It was “forensic science stuff,” the same with wax as with blood or paint, and there was no way on God’s green earth to fake it. No con man could palm off a fake
Scream
—assuming he knew about the wax at all—because the splashes of wax would serve as an impossible-to-forge signature.

At a desk in his local library piled high with art books, Hill flipped to a close-up of
The Scream
. Then he set out to memorize the exact arrangement of the waxy drips.

PART III
The Man from the Getty

13
“Watch the Papers!”

APRIL 1994

C
harley Hill was now steeped in the details of Edvard Munch’s life. With the Getty’s cooperation lined up, Hill was eager to bring Chris Roberts on stage. The problem was that no one had heard from the thieves.

It was mid-April, and
The Scream
had been gone two months. It was time, Scotland Yard decided, to coax the crooks out from hiding. Dick Ellis knew a dubious art dealer in Paris and prevailed on him to spread the word that the Getty was eager to work a deal for
The Scream
. There was nothing special about Paris in this case, except that it wasn’t London, so there would be no reason to suspect that Scotland Yard was involved.

In order to clear the way for the real thieves, Hill had to get rid of the pretenders. The first order of business was to dismiss Billy Harwood, the English criminal who had served time in a Norwegian prison and claimed to know the thieves who had
The Scream
. Harwood, the British cops had decided, was a scam artist.

Hill phoned Harwood. He was Chris Roberts, he said, the man from the Getty, working with Norway’s National Gallery to recover
The Scream
. For this conversation, all Hill’s newly acquired opinions on such matters as Munch’s use of bold colors to convey emotional turmoil were beside the point. Hayward was a waste of time, and Hill was a man in a hurry.

One appealing aspect of undercover work, Hill liked to say, was that it gave him a chance “to call on certain of my less attractive character traits—arrogance, bullying, self-importance—it’s a long list, but you get the idea.” He spoke lightly, as if he were joking, but, fittingly for an undercover man, Hill liked to hide in plain sight. Many of his jokes were simply unpalatable truths.

For undercover cops, who operate more or less on their own, bullying and self-importance
are
perennial temptations. Grandiosity is an occupational hazard. “The undercover stuff can get to you,” Hill once remarked. “You start believing your own bullshit, thinking you’re completely immune to having to address anything that smacks of the difference between right and wrong.”

Despite his scholarly tastes, Hill had a menacing, domineering way about him, and he used it to his advantage. Skinny when he was young, he had grown into a burly man. In a good mood, Hill had a teddy bear look, but the softness was deceptive. Like anyone with a bad temper, he felt a certain pleasure in giving way to his anger. During his days as a beat cop, Hill had pounded more than one mugger to the ground, and the memory of blows delivered (and caught) still pleased him years later. There was a code involved, and Hill would never pick on a little guy. But he believed in frontier justice, and he liked to quote a passage from
Elmer Gantry
. “He was,” Sinclair Lewis wrote of his title character, who had started a brawl, “in that most blissful condition to which a powerful young man can attain—unrighteous violence in a righteous cause.”

Hill was that rare creature, a bully with a taste for literature, and it was typical of him not only to see bliss in a beating but also to quote an author in support of his view. Now, as Chris Roberts, he shoved Billy Harwood out of his way.

The message wasn’t subtle. In almost so many words, Hill told Harwood to go to hell. He was asking too much, he was an asshole, and nobody was going to have any dealings with him. Harwood stammered in dismay and repeated his eagerness to help the authorities. “Mr. Helpful Citizen,” Hill scoffed, once Harwood was out of the way. “And all he asked in exchange was £5 million.”

The National Gallery, following Scotland Yard’s instructions, made a great fuss of announcing that anyone who had any information about
The Scream
should contact Jens Kristian Thune, the museum’s chairman of the board. Thune was a prominent and prosperous lawyer, but he had been chosen as mission control for the recovery of
The Scream
essentially by default. More worldly than the rest of the crew at the National Gallery, the portly and red-faced lawyer seemed better suited than any of the other museum officials to serve as the intermediary between the National Gallery and the public.

But all this—the theft of a masterpiece, the clamor from the world’s press, the presence of Scotland Yard, the hatching of undercover schemes—was new and astonishing to Thune, who found himself living inside one of the thrillers he liked to read. When
The Scream
was stolen, he had been National Gallery chairman for less than a week. The position, as it had been explained to him, was largely honorary. He would be expected to attend a few board meetings a year and to help choose a new director when Knut Berg retired the following year. No heavy lifting, except for the occasional glass of wine at a fundraiser.

On Friday, February 10, the day before the theft, Berg had taken his new chairman on an attic-to-basement tour of the National Gallery. Thune met all the museum’s employees, visited the guard’s security station, and marveled at the Munch exhibit. The next morning, Saturday, he drove with his family to the main train station in Oslo, headed for Lillehammer and the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games. At 6:25 in the morning, the taxi passed in front of the National Gallery. Thune chattered excitedly to his family about the museum and his new job and the tour he had taken the day before.

Had the taxi been four minutes later, he might have seen a ladder standing curiously out of place.

Thrilled that the job of art museum chairman had magically given him entrée to a world of hard-boiled detectives and shady informants, Thune performed his new duties zealously. He was especially pleased with the tape recorder that the police had rigged up in his office. Each time the phone rang, he eagerly pressed the “record” button.

The calls poured in, the tapes rolled, and the red herrings piled up. Many tips seemed so transparently dubious—”Buy me dinner and a drink and I’ll make it worth your while”—that the police could reject them at once. Some leads took time and trouble to investigate. In early April, a police source told Leif Lier, the detective in charge of the investigation, that Munch’s painting was in Stockholm in a locker at the train station.
The Scream
had been taken from its frame—Lier groaned—and stuffed inside a hockey bag. The Norwegians prevailed on their colleagues in Stockholm to check out each of the thousands of lockers in the train station. The search began on April 3, Easter Sunday, interrupting the Swedish cops’ holiday. It took three days. Nothing.

The breakthrough finally came on Sunday, April 24. Thune had a cousin by marriage named Einar-Tore Ulving, who happened to be an art dealer. Small and high-strung, with a large, bald head that made him look a bit like Elmer Fudd, Ulving didn’t cut much of a figure. He had a sharp eye for a deal, though, and his business had prospered. Ulving owned a summer house and a part-interest in a hotel (both properties only a short distance from Munch’s summer house, in the town of Øsgårdstrand), and he liked to swoop low over the Norwegian countryside in his helicopter.

One of Ulving’s clients stood out. His name was Tor Johnsen,
^*
and he and Ulving made a strange pair. Ulving was soft and nervous, with the scrubbed-pink look of a ten-year-old buffed and honed for a piano recital; Johnsen was big and disheveled and, if not quite handsome, at least somewhere in the vicinity. Above all, he was menacing. Johnsen was, in Norwegian parlance, a “torpedo”—an enforcer, or leg-breaker, whose job was to convince people who owed money to Johnsen’s employers that it would be prudent to pay up. He had spent a dozen years in prison for setting fire to a house and killing several people inside. Between stints in solitary—Johnsen repeatedly attacked the prison guards—he had taken up Thai kick-boxing. Strong, agile, and bad-tempered, he became a jailhouse star and later a Scandinavian champion.

In the early 1990s, Johnsen developed an unexpected interest. He began showing up at art galleries and auctions, both buying and selling paintings. Ulving had noticed the “well-dressed, good-looking” newcomer but had not caught on immediately to his true character, perhaps because at their first meeting Johnsen was accompanied by a well-known and wealthy shipowner (the two had met at the racetrack). Soon enough, Ulving learned enough to fill in a little of Johnsen’s biography. Still, he was an art dealer, not a social worker. Johnsen became a valued customer.

Toward the end of April 1994 Johnsen phoned Ulving. He knew some people, the ex-con said, who could arrange for
The Scream
to be returned to the National Gallery. He remembered, too, that Ulving and Thune were cousins of some sort. Maybe Ulving could give Thune a call.

On April 24, Ulving phoned Thune. Ordinarily, Ulving would have highlighted the good points of someone he was vouching for. Here, in an attempt to boost Johnsen’s credibility as a thief and a friend of thieves, he stood the usual formula on its head. “I told him that Mr. Johnsen’s reputation was not very good,” Ulving recalled years later. “I told him he was a violent man. I told him he had been sentenced to jail for twelve years. So Mr. Thune knew all about him. And he asked me, ‘Do you think this is substantial?’ And I said, ‘Based on what I know about Mr. Tor Johnsen, I think this is really substantial, and should be followed up.’ “

When Ulving reported back to Johnsen, he admitted that he didn’t know how seriously Thune had taken his message. For the next few days, Johnsen replied, it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the newspaper.

The next day, April 25, the top crime reporter at
Dagbladet
picked up his phone and heard a familiar voice. The caller had passed along useful tips in the past, and now he claimed to have information about
The Scream
. He couldn’t say more than that on the phone.

The reporter, Gunnar Hultgreen, arranged to meet his informant face-to-face. Hultgreen rattled off questions, but the informant ducked them, on the grounds that he was only delivering a message. He mumbled something vague about “evidence” that would support his story, rattled off a few place names, and told Hultgreen to find a photographer. Hultgreen scribbled names and crude directions in his notebook—Nittedal, just east of Oslo; signs for Skedsmokorset; the village of Slattum; a right turn; a bus stop.

Hultgreen nabbed one of the newspaper’s photographers. Then he phoned Lief Plahter, the chief restorer at the National Gallery, and told him he would pick him up in a few minutes. Plahter had worked on
The Scream
and knew it well.

Nittedal was about a dozen miles east of town, but the informant’s directions were frustratingly sketchy. Eventually the reporter, the photographer, and the art restorer found a likely bus stop and inched along the road nearby, scanning the ground, though they weren’t quite sure what they were looking for. Finding nothing on their first sweep, they turned around and crept back toward the bus stop.

It was the photographer who shouted first. “Could that be it?”

He had spotted a piece of carved wood a few inches long in the grass by the side of the road. The three men scrambled out of the car, the white-haired art restorer trailing his younger colleagues.

“Oh, my God,” Plahter cried, as soon as he caught up with the others. “This is the frame.”

It was, more precisely, a short section of the frame, lying upside down. No one touched it, in case the thieves had left fingerprints, but Plahter bent down for a closer look. He had recognized the frame at once because of its color and design, and now he saw indisputable proof that this small piece of wood was what it purported to be. Plahter pointed at the neat lettering on the back of the frame and read off the National Gallery’s identification number.

The next day’s tabloid headline screamed out,
WE FOUND THE FRAME
.