Lasse Jacobsen, a research librarian at the Munch Museum in Oslo who works with Munch’s collected writings, confirmed Guleng’s findings. The infrared photographs, he said, made it “much easier to see the words, and there are some letters in his handwriting that are really distinct, like the N, or the D, which turns up at the end. So when I saw it there I thought, ‘This is Munch.’”The 2008 Munch catalog raisonné, a comprehensive study of his works by the art historian Gerd Woll, suggested that the phrase had been scrawled by a vandal. “It was strange to me that there was such little curiosity about this inscription, because it is a very peculiar thing to write on your own painting,” she said. Munch probably wrote the sentence on his painting in 1895, according to Guleng, after his exhibition of new work at the Blomqvist gallery in Oslo.

Source: New York Times February 21, 2021 22:52 UTC