Twice in a decade, thieves walked into Norwegian museums, tore Edvard Munch’s most famous image off the wall in full view of witnesses, and vanished into the streets of Oslo with a painting worth tens of millions of dollars folded under an arm. Both times, against long odds and despite fears the paintings had been destroyed to erase evidence, “The Scream” came home. The two heists, a decade apart, turned one of the most reproduced images in art history — the swirling orange sky, the hollow-eyed figure clutching its face — into one of the most stolen as well.

Fifty Seconds, One Broken Window

The first theft happened on February 12, 1994, the very morning the Winter Olympics opened in Lillehammer and much of Norway’s police attention was focused elsewhere. Two thieves used a ladder to reach a window at Oslo’s National Gallery, smashed the glass, cut the wire securing the 1893 tempera version of “The Scream,” and were gone in under a minute, leaving behind a postcard that read, “Thanks for the poor security.” The brazenness of the heist, timed to a moment of national distraction and international spotlight, made global headlines within hours. Norwegian police, working with Getty Museum security expert Charles Hill in an undercover sting, recovered the painting undamaged on May 7, 1994, at a hotel in Åsgårdstrand, roughly 40 miles south of Oslo. Four men were eventually convicted in the case, including Pål Enger, a former professional footballer with a prior conviction for stealing another Munch work, “The Vampire,” in 1988; the paintings’ owner declined to press for the maximum sentence, in part because the museum’s own security lapses had been so glaring.

A Second Theft, in Broad Daylight

A decade later, on August 22, 2004, masked gunmen stormed the Munch Museum in Oslo in the middle of the day, threatened staff and visitors at gunpoint, and ripped both a different, 1910 tempera version of “The Scream” and Munch’s “Madonna” straight off the walls, damaging their frames in the process. A bystander photographed the thieves fleeing to a waiting car. Unlike the quiet, opportunistic 1994 job, this was a loud, violent daylight robbery that traumatized witnesses and briefly closed the museum entirely while it reassessed security. For nearly two years afterward, the paintings’ fate was unknown, and rumors circulated that the thieves had burned them to destroy evidence linking them to the crime.

Trial Without the Evidence

Norwegian police arrested their first suspect in the 2004 case in April 2005, and by June that year four men were already in custody even though the paintings themselves remained missing; the city of Oslo offered a reward of roughly two million kroner (about $313,000 at the time) for information leading to their recovery. Six men eventually went on trial in early 2006 on charges ranging from planning the robbery to driving the getaway car, an unusual case in which prosecutors had to prove an art theft largely without the stolen art in hand. Three were convicted in May 2006: Bjørn Hoen received seven years for orchestrating the plot, Petter Tharaldsen was sentenced to eight years as the getaway driver, and Petter Rosenvinge received four years for supplying the vehicle.

Found, Damaged, and Restored

Then, in August 2006, Norwegian police made the announcement the art world had all but given up hoping for: both “The Scream” and “Madonna” had been recovered. Rather than being destroyed, the paintings had simply been stashed and neglected, and while investigators feared the worst, conservators found the damage was largely limited to moisture staining, small tears, and paint loss around the edges — serious, but far short of the destruction many had assumed. Munch Museum conservators spent months restoring both works before returning “The Scream” to public display, wear-and-tear included, as a visible reminder of what it had survived.

Two Versions, One Legend

Part of what makes the story of “The Scream” thefts so layered is that Munch made multiple versions of the image across different media — the two most famous being the 1893 tempera-and-pastel work held (at the time of the first theft) by the National Gallery, and the 1910 tempera version housed at the Munch Museum, stolen in the second robbery. A third version, in pastel, sold at Sotheby’s in 2012 for nearly $120 million, at the time a record for any work of art at auction, underscoring just how much value — cultural and financial — was riding on wooden frames guarded, in both 1994 and 2004, with security that proved wildly inadequate for what hung on the walls.

Why This Case Still Matters

The twin thefts of “The Scream” remain a textbook example of how museums chronically underestimate the audacity of art thieves and the difficulty of ever truly liquidating a stolen masterpiece. Both heists were pulled off with almost embarrassing ease — a ladder and a broken window in one case, gunmen and a getaway car in broad daylight in the other — and both ultimately failed because there was simply no legitimate market in which to sell a painting that famous. The cases prompted major security overhauls at both Norwegian institutions, and they remain a fixture in museum-security training precisely because they show that recovery, while possible, depends heavily on informants, undercover work, and luck rather than the paintings’ own defenses.

A Face Still Screaming

Both stolen versions of “The Scream” hang once more in Oslo, scarred but intact, having survived two thefts, a police sting, a criminal trial conducted without the evidence in hand, and nearly two years of uncertain fate. Munch painted the figure to capture what he described as a scream passing through nature itself — an image so universally understood that thieves twice believed it could simply be resold or ransomed like any other object. Why, then, did none of them ever find a buyer for the most recognizable face of anguish in art history?