"Can only have been painted by a madman."

Words by Edvard Munch in tiny letters in the most famous version of "The Scream," The Art Newspaper reports. 

Can we be sure that the artist wrote these words? Mai Britt Guleng, the curator of Old Masters and modern paintings at the National Museum of Norway, says yes. First, the handwriting matches up to other samples of Munch's handwriting. Second, the writing is tiny:

“Had this been an act of vandalism by another person, the size of the letters would probably have been larger and the whole text more striking when you stand in front of the work."

Third — though I think this is a fact that could cut either way — the words are not painted over.

“There has been strangely little attention to the inscription.... some researchers have taken it for granted that it was written by Munch, but they haven’t discussed why and when. From 2008 it has been generally accepted that the writing was made by another person, without any discussion at all."

Guleng notes that Munch heard criticism of his work and was "confronted about his mental health" on one occasion. Why would that motivate him to write on his own painting? That's more interesting than the question whether he or some vandal wrote it. Let's assume Munch wrote it. Why did he write it? Don't assume he was judging and doubting himself. There are other possibilities: he was satirizing his critics, he was inviting us to contemplate whether only madmen paint like that, or he was celebrating himself as a madman.

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This is the 9th post with the tag "The Scream."

The oldest post with the tag is "Shimmering shining shriek/scream" from April 2005. Excerpt:

Later, I watched the DVD of "After Hours"...

Paul [looking at Kiki's papier maché sculpture]: It reminds me of that Edvard Munch painting. What is it? "The Shriek"?

Kiki: "The Scream."

Googling for a picture for "The Scream," to illustrate this post [that was already] about how things go together, I hit a Reuters story from one hour ago, saying they've just today arrested a man for the theft of "The Scream." (The painting was stolen last August.) I love that feeling of things seeming to converge. I know it's only an illusion.

"Each novel takes him around five years: a long build-up of research and thinking, followed by a speedy first draft, a process he compares to a samurai sword fight."

"'You stare at each other silently for ages, usually with tall grass blowing away and moody sky. You are thinking all the time, and then in a split second it happens. The swords are drawn: Wham! Wham! Wham! And one of them falls,' he explains, wielding an imaginary sword at the screen. 'You had to get your mind absolutely right and then when you drew that sword you just did it: Wham! It had to be the perfect cut.' As a child, he was mystified by swashbuckling Errol Flynn films when he first came to the UK, in which the sword fights consisted of actors going 'ching, ching, ching, ching, for about 20 minutes while talking to each other,' he says. 'Perhaps there’s a way of writing fiction like that, where you work it out in the act, but I tend towards the "Don’t do anything, it’s all internal" approach.'"

From "Kazuo Ishiguro: 'AI, gene-editing, big data ... I worry we are not in control of these things any more'" (The Guardian). Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

What I wanted to learn.

I wanted to take the "Master Class" from David Sedaris, but I couldn't bring myself to pay $99 for a subscription to the app until I saw that they also had a class from Billy Collins, a poet I've liked ever since I randomly picked a book off a high shelf at Paul's Books and read one poem.

Both Sedaris and Collins, I see now, begin their writing by noticing some little thing that is present in their own life. Both teach that you ought to carry a notebook with you everywhere and jot down these little things as they happen.

That's all writing. Of course, I wanted to learn about writing, but what else? Master Class has 80+ famous people teaching how they each do their thing. I've watched 2 others, neither in the writing category. I watched Bobbi Brown, who teaches about makeup — the kind of makeup that honors whatever face you happen to have. (You do not need to "contour" your nose or "overline" your lips.) And I watched Alice Waters, the restaurateur, who says you really need to start your cooking by getting in touch with your local vegetables.

Do you see the theme of these 4, which I chose without thinking of a theme? The theme occurred to me as I was doing my sunrise run this morning. I don't listen to headphoned-in music anymore when I run. I listen to the immediate environment and let thoughts rise up from within my own head, and I got where I could see how these 4 choices represented a single desire on my part. All these lessons have to do with awareness of what is right here.

When I got back to my car, the radio was on MSNBC, which I'd listened to on my little drive out to my running place. I'd put up with Joe Scarborough angsting about Republicans being less likely  to wear masks than Democrats — what is wrong with them?! — but I didn't want that infecting me on the ride home. I clicked over to music. It was Neil Young:

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleeping
We could dream this night away
But there's a full moon rising
Let's go dancing in the light
We know where the music's playing
Let's go out and feel the night

Neil was getting what was for him an unusual idea: To go out and experience the moon.



I got the idea a while back to get out and experience the sunrise, to go running in the light.