Munch Museum's Report on Thieves' Damage: It Makes You Want to "Scream"

The Conservation of The Scream and Madonna

The conservators at the Munch Museum are now preparing a comprehensive report of the damages to The Scream and Madonna for the Oslo Police Department. Surveying damages to works of art is a difficult task and the paintings will be examined millimetre by millimetre to determine what are previous and what are recent damages to the works of art. Some technical and chemical analyses have to be made with the help of external expertise. When all the necessary data has been assembled the conservators will be able to decide on the relevant treatment of the damages. Ethical guidelines for conservation will determine the choices made in this process, and the decisions will be made in close consultation with the Munch Museum's staff of art historians. For the time being it is not possible to determine when the paintings will be ready for exhibition, but owing to the tears in the canvas the conservation of Madonna is likely to be even more time consuming than that of The Scream.

On 31 August 2006, two years and nine months after the brutal robbery, The Scream and Madonna were finally returned to the Munch Museum. During the five days in September that the two damaged works were on display in specially built glass cases, 5.500 persons visited the exhibition, at times forming long queues in front of the museum entrance.

Our conservators are at present in the process of preparing a comprehensive report of the damages which is to be submitted to the Oslo Police Department before Christmas. Surveying damages to works of art is a difficult task. With the use of a microscope the conservators examine the paintings millimetre by millimetre. The result is then compared with earlier documentation in order to determine what are previous damages and what are recent scratches, tears and stains directly resulting from the robbery. The works of art are more than a century old, and Edvard Munch himself gave his paintings rather a rough treatment.

The report of the damages will form the basis for the conservation work itself. A few technical and chemical analyses have to be made with the help of external expertise. Tiny specimens of the carton on which The Scream is painted will hopefully give an answer to what kind of liquid that has stained the lower left corner of the painting. When one has further knowledge of the chemical composition one will know whether the damage is going to be stable, or whether one may risk the development of further future damage. Other technical analyses will also have to be made by specialized laboratories outside the museum, and this will be a time consuming task. Once all the necessary data has been assembled, however, the conservators will be able to decide on the relevant treatment.

Ethical guidelines for conservation will determine the choices made in this process, and the decisions will be made in close consultation with the Munch Museum's staff of art historians. An important guiding principle is stability: all materials to be utilised must be stable and not lead to future changes in the various layers of paint. Moreover the operation must be reversible: the treatment should not restrict future methods of treatment. The conservators also aim for minimal intervention, that is to say that one only wishes to perform those operations that are strictly necessary. These guidelines will determine whether one will reconstruct the original colours in the stained part of The Scream. One will most probably take a restrained attitude as it is difficult to foresee what kind of chemical reactions modern pigments and binding agents might bring about in the future.

Owing to the tears in the canvas the conservation of Madonna is likely to be even more time consuming than that of The Scream. On the basis of our present knowledge about the chemical composition of binding agents, pigments and the fibres of the canvas one will investigate possible methods of conservation. The broken stretcher must be substituted by a new one, the painting will be cleaned, the threads in the tears will be joined one by one and tiny, loose flakes of paint will be carefully fastened to the canvas with the help of a microscope. Several of the damages are so small that they are invisible to the naked eye, and the conservation will demand both time and patience.

For the time being it is not possible to determine when the paintings will be ready for exhibition, but the Munch Museum's excellent conservators are working intensely to preserve the works of art both for the benefit of today's public as well as for the generations to come.

12/13/06 Elsebet Kjerschow