I Scream, You Scream…

Last week’s news on the art-biz front was, of course, Sotheby’s sale of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which changed hands from Petter Olsen, a Norwegian businessman, to an anonymous bidder –current speculation centers on the royal petro family of Qatar – for just a few dollars shy of $120M.  (Source: Business Week.)

This is the largest amount ever paid for a work of art and is especially interesting to me in that there are four different versions of The Scream out there, which you’d think might have depressed the price a bit. (Not to lump Munch in with the late Thomas Kinkade and his multiple versions of the light struck, flower bedecked romanticized cottages – certainly the conceptual and aesthetic opposites of Munch’s work – but it is on interest that the pricey Scream was not completely a one-off.)

In any case, the proceeds of the sale will fund a museum in the town of Hvitsten, Norway, where Munch had lived and worked. No reports yet on what will be exhibited there, but, like all good self-respecting museums, this one will no doubt sell Scream paraphernalia – key chains, mugs, tee-shirts, Mylar balloons, and maybe even a poster of the Homeric version. 

And speaking of posters…

The Scream’s big sale not only made possible a museum in Hvitsten and a comely commission for Sotheby’s, it’s also goosed sales of posters.

“Before this week, The Scream was a steady seller,” says Geoffroy Martin, the chief executive officer of Art.com, the world’s largest retailer of prints, movie posters, framed art, and other mass-produced wall decor. “I’d say it’s [usually] in the top 50. On Wednesday its sales increased three to four times. Sales increased 10 times yesterday. From a unit point of view, it was the top seller yesterday.”

Ah, the lowly poster, which over the years has managed to grace the walls of many a home.

At present, we  have three up, and none is an art reproduction.

We have a pastiche of Worcester postcards, which looks very nice hanging on the staircase wall. As I have long maintained, spend a couple of hundreds of bucks framing an $8 poster, and you’ve got art.

We also have a poster advertising an exhibit of Gertrude De Genhardt etchings at Kenny’s Gallery in Galway. Our poster depicts a group of Irish boyos, waiting for the pub to open. (An alternative interpretation of “Hurry up, please, it’s time.”)

Our third poster, which somehow my husband just can’t manage to part with, is from the San Diego Zoo, and is a photo of mother-daughter bonobos (pygmy chimps), with whom we were, as it happens, personally acquainted.

But I have had plenty of art posters over the years, my favorite of which were The Goldfish Bowl (Matisse), which now hangs in our building’s communal laundry room, and a Georgia O’Keeffe Jack in the Pulpit – current location unknown. (Jack in the pulpits grew in the woods next to the house where I grew up, and finding the first one of the season – which would have been just about now – was a thrill. Even more thrilling was to come across a lady slipper, but they were only to be found in the woods near the Little Res, an abandoned reservoir where my father often took us for walks and where one late spring day we spied a bunch of teen-age boys swimming in the nude. My father hustled us deeper into the woods on that jaunt. Excitement!)

But I would never have gone for The Scream – just a tad bit too outré and depressing. (Which reminds me of a rather sardonic colleague who suffered from severe depression telling me that at one point when she was hospitalized for her illness, her sister sent her a get well card of Hopper’s Nighthawks – not exactly the cheeriest of scenes.)

While the spike in Scream sales is significant, it probably won’t last all that long, and the sales level will revert to the usual number that is regularly sought by deep-thinking college students, frat-house wits,  and general-purpose gloomsters who want to look at The Scream on a daily basis.

The best-seller position will revert to prints of Van Gogh, Monet, and Andy Warhol. (What, no Matisse?) But for a week, anyway, it’s been a day in the sun(flower), a starry, starry night for The Scream.