Stratospheric echo locates Munch's Scream

Tim Radford, science editor Wednesday December 10, 2003 The Guardian

Astronomers have pinpointed the exact spot where one of the modern world's most dramatic paintings was conceived.

The seeds of Edvard Munch's The Scream were planted while he was walking along a road called LjabrochaussÀen, in Oslo, as the sun went down. He felt "a great unending scream piercing through nature".

The painting's lurid red sky was more than just an expression of that emotion: an amazing series of sunsets followed the eruption in 1883, half a world away, of the Krakatoa volcano, according to next February's issue of Sky and Telescope.

The Scream was one of a series of works by Munch called The Frieze of Life, painted in Berlin 10 years later.

"The majority of those paintings reflect experiences that happened to Munch many years earlier," says Donald Olson, the astronomer and art detective who has so far fixed the location and dates of two Van Goghs, using astronomical knowledge, and established the date of a freak tide in Brittany in 1340, described in Chaucer's The Franklin's Tale.

"The death paintings are particularly clear. Death of the Mother and Death in the Sick Room, done in the 1890s, are based on the death of his mother in 1868 and the death of his sister in 1877.

"These experiences haunted him the rest of his life, as did the lurid, blood red sky."

Prof Olson of Texas State University, and his colleagues Russell Doescher and Marilynn Olson, have made a speciality of celestial evidence in paintings.

The explosion of Krakatoa sent a huge volume of dust high into the stratosphere, affecting skies around the world.

Reports collected by the Royal Society in London confirm that there were unusual twilight glows as far north as Norway from November 1883 to February 1884.

These were reported in a daily newspaper in Christiania, now Oslo.

The trio went to Oslo and found the exact view of the harbour and Hovedo island while walking along a road now called Mosseveien but once known as LjabrochaussÀen.

"We rounded a bend in the road and realised we were standing in the exact spot where Munch had been," Prof Olson says.

"It was a very satisfying experience. The real importance of finding the location though was to determine the direction of view in the painting.

"We could see that Munch was looking to the south-west - exactly where the Krakatoa twilights appeared in the winter of 1883-84."