The Scream That Set Edvard Munch's Auction Record

Edvard Munch's The Scream (1895) sold for $119.9m at Sotheby's New York on May 2, 2012, becoming the most expensive work of art sold at auction.

The pastel on board work is one of four versions Munch created of his most famous composition and it is the only one in private hands. Consigned by the Norwegian shipping heir Petter Olsen, whose father was a friend and patron of the artist, it was bought by the billionaire collector Leon Black.

Munch created The Scream as part of an epic series titled "Frieze of Life", which explores modern emotional life through the themes of Love, Anxiety and Death. Unveiled in Berlin in 1893, The Scream quickly became the most famous part of the frieze, boosted by the more than one hundred lithographs Munch produced of the tortured figure on a lakeside under a flaming sky.

Munch painted his 1895 version for a German coffee magnate, Arthur von Franquet, probably as a commission. The artist inscribed in red paint on its frame a prose-poem that ends with the dramatic line: "My Friends walked on – I remained behind – shivering with Anxiety – I felt the great Scream in Nature."

The sale beat Munch's previous auction record by $81.76m, a 200% rise. His previous record was set by Vampire (1894), which sold for $38.16m at Sotheby's on November 03, 2008. The work had been traded once in the past.

A Brief History of Edvard Munch at Auction