Edvard Munch's "The Scream" is stolen - February 12th, 1994

On this day in 1994, Edvard Munch's world-famous painting “The Scream" was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that proves there's more than one way to make history.
I'm Gabe Luesier, and in this episode we're looking at

(00:23):
the brazen theft of an iconic work of Norwegian art.
It's been nicknamed Norway's Mona Lisa for its renown, but
you probably know it simply as The Scream. The day
was February twelfth, nineteen ninety four. Edvard Monk's world famous

(00:45):
painting The Scream, was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway.
The man responsible was professional footballer turned career criminal Paul Anger.
He had timed the audacious morning heist to coincide with
the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, which were being
held in nearby Lillehammer. Anger correctly assumed that most of

(01:09):
Oslo's police force would be busy securing that massive event,
but in the end it hardly mattered one way or
the other. The security at the National Gallery was so
lax that Anger's two accomplices were able to break in,
snatch the painting, and escape in less than a minute.
They even had time to dash off a taunting note

(01:31):
to the museum thanks for the poor security. Paul Anger
first saw Edvard Monk's expressionist masterpiece The Scream on a
school trip as a child. At the time, he was
enduring the abuse of his violent stepfather. In the mood
of the painting, with its ominous orange red sky and
anguished waiflike figure, seemed to echo his own trauma. My

(01:56):
obsession with this picture started the first time I saw it,
Anger later recalled, as soon as I got close to
the picture, I got an extraordinary feeling of anxiety, strange
things in my head. I had such an intense connection
with The Scream right away, and it's never left me.
Anger's upbringing influenced his life in at least one other

(02:18):
way as well. He grew up in Oslow's Tovite A neighborhood,
an area known for its high crime rate in the
nineteen seventies. He began contributing to that reputation at an
early age, first by shoplifting candy from local stores and
later by robbing jewelry shops, boosting cars, and breaking into ATMs.

(02:40):
His swift embrace of a life of crime might lead
you to assume he had no other prospects, but far
from it. As a teenager, Anger honed his skills on
the football pitch and became a very promising athlete. In fact,
in nineteen eighty five, the year he turned eighteen, Anger
was recruited to play for uaal Oranga, Oslow's professional football club.

(03:04):
For the next several years, he lived a double life,
a rising star athlete by day and an expert safecracker
by night. That would have been more than enough excitement
for most people, but, as Anger later admitted, quote, I
wanted more. I always liked attention. I wanted money and fame,
but at that time I most wanted to show the

(03:26):
world I could pull off something huge. He decided the
best way to do that was to apply his skill
as a thief to his lifelong fixation on Edvard Monk's
The Scream. In nineteen eighty eight, Anger partnered with his
longtime accomplice Bjorn Gritdahl, and together they hatched a plan
to steal the iconic painting from Oslow's National Gallery. However,

(03:51):
they misjudged the artwork's position in the museum and wound
up stealing a different work by Monk called Vampire instead.
The pair was eventually caught after grit Dhal's neighbor learned
of the heist and turned them over to the police.
But even though Anger spent the next four years in prison,
a stint that cost him his sports career, he still

(04:13):
didn't give up on his dream of nabbing the Scream.
After his release in nineteen ninety two, Anger bided his
time and waited for the perfect opportunity to present itself.
The moment finally came on February twelfth, nineteen ninety four,
the opening day of that year's Winter Olympics in Lillehammer,

(04:34):
just two hours north from Oslow. Bafflingly, the museum hadn't
upgraded its security since Anger's last smash and grab, but
the thief still didn't want a risk being caught in
the act, so this time he enlisted the help of
an unhoused local named William Eyeshame. When the fateful day arrived,
Anger stayed home with his wife while Eyeshame and an

(04:56):
accomplice carried out his master plan. Only that morning, the
thieves used a ladder to climb up to a window
of the National Gallery. Then they simply broke the window,
climbed inside, grabbed the painting and left. They weren't seen
by a single soul during the minute long robbery, and
although the museum did have a few surveillance cameras, the

(05:18):
video was too blurry to be of use to the police.
News of the theft made headlines all over the world,
stealing the Olympics thunder and causing national embarrassment for Norway.
Anger was naturally the police's top suspect, as he had
already stolen a monk painting from the museum once before,
but with nothing to tie him to the crime, all

(05:40):
they could do was monitor his movements. Anger reveled in
that fact and taunted the police every chance he got.
He called in false leads just to waste their time,
and when his first son was born a few weeks
after the heist, he took out an ad in the
newspaper announcing that the boy had been born quote with
a screen. The Norwegian police had hit a brick wall

(06:03):
in their investigation, so they solicited help from a specialized
unit of London's Scotland Yard that dealt with art theft. Meanwhile,
Anger began to feel the heat from his crime, so
he started to try to fence his beloved painting through
a crooked art dealer named Ulving. It didn't take long
for Scotland Yard to catch wind of Olving's attempts to

(06:25):
find a buyer, so they arranged a meeting with him
at an Oslo hotel and sent along undercover detective Charlie
Hill to pose as a potential buyer from the Getty
Museum in California. By that point, about three months after
the heist, Anger was desperate to get the painting out
of his house as fast as possible, so he had

(06:45):
his longtime accomplice, Bjorn Gritdhal, stashed the scream at a
beachside cottage in a small village south of Oslow. Then
he told Ulving to sell the priceless painting for the
poultry sum of about four hundred thousand dollars. When Hill
met with Ulving, he happily agreed to the price and
the two of them drove out to the cottage to

(07:06):
retrieve the painting. Once there, Hill was able to identify
the artwork as the real deal thanks to a tell
tale pattern of wax droplets found just to the left
of the screaming subject's shoulder, a result of the artist
having blown out a candle on it. Ulving was arrested
on the spot, and soon after so were Gritdal, Eye,

(07:26):
Shame and lastly the Mastermind himself. The other men were
eventually released on technicalities, but Anger wound up serving six
years in prison, the longest sentence in Norwegian history for
art theft. During his time behind bars, Anger taught himself
to paint, and as a free man he is now

(07:47):
something of an in demand artist himself. His crime helped
him achieve the fame or infamy he had always longed for,
and as a result, he claims to have no regrets
whatsoever about stealing The Scream. I made history, he told
reporters in twenty twenty one, and it's a cool story.
Movies are made about things like that, but this wasn't

(08:09):
a movie. This was real life. Given Anger's bad example,
it's maybe no surprise that Monk's cryptic portrait of Distress
was later stolen again. To be fair, though it wasn't
the same copy stolen by Anger. Monk actually created four
versions of the same scene, two in paint and two

(08:30):
in pastels, but all of them confusingly titled the Scream.
The painted version Anger stole was the first exhibited way
back in eighteen ninety three. After its recovery, the painting
was returned to the National Gallery and now hangs under
much tighter security at the new National Museum in Oslo.

(08:51):
The other painted version belongs to the Monk Museum, also
in Oslo, and it's that copy that was stolen at
gunpoint in August of two thousand and four, along with
another Monk painting called the Madonna. Both of those works
were ultimately recovered as well, and in two thousand and
six three men were convicted in connection with the crime.

(09:12):
For anyone keeping track, that means that Norway's Mona Lisa
has technically been stolen more times than the actual Mona
Lisa two to one. It's definitely not a contest, but
at least as far as our thieves are concerned. In
enigmatic smile just can't match the allure of a mysterious screen.

(09:36):
I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. If you
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(09:56):
send your feedback directly by writing to This Day at
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and thanks to you for listening, and I'll see you
back here again tomorrow for another Day in History class