Edvard Munch wrote a hidden ‘crazy’ post on ‘The Scream’

This discovery will make art lovers cry again.

Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ – an 1893 expressionist painting so famous that it has its own emoji – contains a disturbing hidden message that art historians have now determined was written by the artist for him. -even.

The pencil inscription reads: “May only have been painted by a madman,” infrared scans showed.

And although historians have long known the phrase, small and hidden among the distorted brushstrokes that make up the screaming figure, there has been speculation that it was graffiti by an observer, not the Norwegian artist.

But that mystery can now be solved, said Mai Britt Guleng, curator of old masters and modern paintings at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design of Norway, owner of the painting.

Guleng and his team made the groundbreaking discovery after comparing the writing of the Norwegian artist’s journal entry and letters.

“The writing is definitely Munch’s,” she told the BBC. “The writing itself, as well as the events of 1895, when Munch first showed the painting in Norway, all point in the same direction.

The phrase’s mysterious origins help complete a sad picture: Munch created the painting, which has now become a universal symbol of deadly anxiety, just after his sister Laura took refuge in an asylum with bipolar disorder.

Although the screaming figure does not look like her, she is believed to be influenced by her own experience of watching a blood red sky after being abandoned by two companions, seen in the background. At that point, he was struck by a “burst of melancholy,” according to his diary.

After Munch unveiled the painting, reactions centered on his own sanity, rather than the painting itself.

Experts said it made sense that Munch wrote the inscription “crazy” after struggling with the many critical critics at the time. In 1908, he suffered a depression.

“It’s a combination of irony, but also to show vulnerability,” Guleng told The Guardian. “In fact, he takes it very seriously and he is hurt because there is a history of illness in his family, and he was very anxious, but he showed himself marked by it.