For a century the graffiti was thought to have been the scream of a critic offended by the “abnormality” of Edvard Munch’s art.
A conservation project on The Scream has, however, confirmed that Munch himself scrawled “can only have been painted by a madman” in pencil on his most famous painting.
Infrared scanning of the first painted version of the artwork has drawn a match between the tiny lettering and documents written by the Norwegian artist.
“I would prefer to call it an inscription and not graffiti now,” Mai Britt Guleng, a curator at the National Museum of Norway, said.
The museum’s version, which is one of four, was painted in 1893 and exhibited in Oslo two years later.
Munch’s style was derided at the
