Its premiere in society was a failure.In 1893 Edvard Munch painted the first version of El Grit.The piece (in oil, tempera and cake on cardboard) was exhibited that same year in Norway and did not have a happy reception: it was qualified as a insane work and a critic considered it so disturbing, which recommended pregnant women to refrain from seeing it.The years would put the scream in the place he deserved.
Last night, the Sotheby's auction house in New York finished one of the four versions of the piece, 1895, in the record price of US $ 119.9 million, exceeding the oil of naked Picasso, green leaves and bust, auctioned in 2010for US $ 106 million.
The sale aroused great expectation and the experts bet that the work, in cake on table and valued at US $ 80 million, could reach US $ 200 million.He did not succeed, but still the scream rises as the most expensive work sold in public auction, only surpassed by the Cézanne letters, which was sold in a private transaction in US $ 250 million, to the Royal Family of Qatar.Last night it was speculated on the interest they had for Munch's painting;However, the identity of the buyer, who bid for 12 minutes by phone, was not revealed.
While the original and two other twins of 1910 are in the National Gallery of Norway and in the Munch Museum in Oslo, this version of El Grites the most colorful and has a hand -painted frame by the artist, who scored fragments of historyof the canvas.
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In addition, it is the only one who was in the hands of private: the owner was the Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, whose father was a neighbor and patron of Munch."It's a picture too important to have it at home.I should be able to see more people, "he said.
Symbol of the anguish of modern man, the cry is also an expression of the artist's torments: born in 1863, in his childhood he suffered the death of his mother and a sister by tuberculosis.When he was 25, his father died and then his sister Laura was admitted to a psychiatric by schizophrenia.
Munch was on the verge of despair.First he relieved himself in his life diary: "I walked with two friends, suddenly the sky stained with blood red, stopped and leaning on a dead fence of tiredness.Blood and tongues of fire lurked on the dark blue of the fjord and the city (...), I stayed still, trembling with anxiety, I felt an infinite cry that crossed nature, "he wrote.
Death in 1944, his work became an icon of the twentieth century.In 1961, Time Magazine used it for its cover on psychological disorders, and in 1983 Andy Warhol used it for a series of stamps in silk."The cry is the most important picture that Sotheby's ever has auctioned," according to the expert Philip Hook.
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