Edvard Munch’s iconic painting “The Scream” sold for a record $119.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday night.
The Norwegian artist’s piece, which had been expected to fetch at least $80 million, attracted the attention of seven bidders and took 12 minutes to reach its record price from an opening bid of $40 million.
Sotheby’s announced the sale price on Twitter and said it was highest amount paid for any work of art at auction.
The buyer’s identity is not known.
It eclipsed the record auction sale of Pablo Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” which went for $106.5 million in May 2010 and Alberto Giacometti’s “L’Homme qui marche I,” which sold for $104.3 million in February 2010.
The painting depicts a bald, skeletal figure in a blue shirt standing at a popular suicide spot on Oslo’s horseshoe-shaped bay where people could often hear screams from a nearby insane asylum, The Wall Street Journal explained, citing art historians. Munch’s sister, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was housed in that asylum.
Part of the reason for the excitement around “The Scream,” which dates from 1895, is that it is the last of four versions —Â created between 1893 and 1910 — of the painting in private hands. The other three are all in museums in Oslo.
It was sold by private collector Petter Olsen, whose father was friends with the artist.
Olsen said ahead of the auction, “I have lived with this work all my life, and its power and energy have only increased with time. Now, however, I feel the moment has come to offer the rest of the world a chance to own and appreciate this remarkable work.”
Olsen said his family hid the work during World War II, along with dozens of other Munch artworks, in a hay barn to protect them from the Nazis, who had occupied Norway and were destroying artworks they deemed degenerate.
He added that he offered up “The Scream” for sale in order to fund a museum of Munch’s work.
David Norman, Sotheby’s global head of Impressionist and Modern Art, described the work as “the most representative image of the anxiety, the despair, the enormity of confronting human existence.”