Lasse Jacobsen, a analysis librarian on the Munch Museum in Oslo who works with Munch’s collected writings, confirmed Guleng’s findings. The infrared pictures, he mentioned, made it “a lot simpler to see the phrases, and there are some letters in his handwriting which are actually distinct, just like the N, or the D, which turns up on the finish. So after I noticed it there I believed, ‘That is Munch.’”
The 2008 Munch catalog raisonné, a complete examine of his works by the artwork historian Gerd Woll, steered that the phrase had been scrawled by a vandal. “A minimum of that’s the way it was perceived in 1904,” when it was exhibited in Copenhagen, she writes, “{that a} tactless hand has written in pencil.” In an e mail to The New York Instances, Woll mentioned that the brand new proof from Guleng “strongly factors to Munch himself as the author.”
Whereas the Nationwide Museum in Norway was within the technique of restoring and inspecting the work in preparation for the opening of its new museum in 2022, Guleng took the chance to resolve the query in regards to the textual content.
“It was unusual to me that there was such little curiosity about this inscription, as a result of it’s a very peculiar factor to put in writing by yourself portray,” she mentioned.
Munch in all probability wrote the sentence on his portray in 1895, in keeping with Guleng, after his exhibition of latest work on the Blomqvist gallery in Oslo. Throughout a debate in regards to the exhibition on the College of Oslo’s College students Affiliation one night time, a medical scholar, Johan Scharffenberg mentioned the art work gave him cause to query the artist’s psychological state, calling Munch irregular and a “madman.” Munch was deeply harm, mentioned Jacobsen, and wrote about it even a long time later.
Guleng believes the inscription is written with irony and displays each ache at being attacked and concern of being considered mentally unwell. “By scripting this inscription within the clouds, he took possession, in a method, or he took management of how he was to be perceived and understood,” she mentioned.