On this day in 2004, two masked men walked into the Munch Museum in Oslo in the middle of a Sunday morning and took two paintings off the wall at gunpoint. One of them was a version of The Scream. Both were recovered two years later.
What I want you to see is not the theft but the object. The picture below is not oil on stretched canvas. It is paint on cardboard — board, the sort of thing you might use to back a drawing — worked thin, with crayon and pencil left visible where Munch let them be, and no varnish over the top to protect any of it. He allowed weather to get at his paintings during his lifetime. The surface is soft. A fingernail is enough. It was carried out of the building like a piece of furniture.
When it came back in 2006, the conservators found a damp stain in the lower left corner and damage along an edge, and after long looking they chose to stabilise rather than repaint. So the mark stays. That is a real decision, made by people who spend their working lives under raking light with a swab in one hand, and it is the kindest thing anyone did to this painting in a hundred and thirty years: they let it keep what happened to it, and asked it to survive rather than pretend.
Fabien, the detail I keep is that the visitors in the gallery that Sunday morning took it for a performance at first, some staged piece laid on by the museum, and only understood when the frames came off the wall. An audience will forgive almost anything if it thinks it was programmed.