It turns out that Munch's 'The Scream' is losing color as he breathes


By

Jeremy Keith

Norwegian painter Edvard Munch 's ' The Scream ' is known as one of his masterpieces, featuring a distinctively painted face and a blood-red sunset. It has long been pointed out that the colors in this masterpiece have gradually deteriorated, and a recent study has revealed that the answer lies in 'breathing.'

Probing the chemistry of CdS paints in The Scream by in situ noninvasive spectroscopies and synchrotron radiation x-ray techniques | Science Advances
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/20/eaay3514

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/18/human-breath-taking-its-toll-on-munch-the-scream-say-scientists-1910-damaging-humidity-paint

'The Scream' is a series of paintings created between 1893 and 1910. The work depicts a hallucination that Munch had, in which a man in the center of the painting clutches his cheek, his face contorted in fear at the 'endless scream that pierces nature' - a blue-black fjord and a blood-red sky.

The Munch Museum in Norway has a pastel painting from 1893 and a tempera painting from 1910 out of the multiple 'Screams' that exist. The tempera painting of 'The Scream' is below.



It has long been pointed out that the colors of this tempera painting, 'The Scream,' have been fading over the years.

A joint research team from the Munch Museum and the Italian National Research Council investigated the cause and found that the tempera painting 'The Scream' had lost its color due to deterioration of the pigments.

According to the research team, the tempera painting 'The Scream' used a pigment mainly composed of

cadmium sulfide as a yellow pigment. However, some of the pigments used by Munch contained cadmium sulfide with low purity and poor quality. The research team states that this poor quality pigment is very vulnerable to moisture and can deteriorate even with the slight moisture contained in human breath. In other words, the pigments in the tempera painting 'The Scream' gradually deteriorated due to years of exposure to the moisture contained in the breath of museum visitors.

'When people breathe, moisture is produced, which creates chlorides in the pigments, so it's not a good idea for viewers to get so close to the painting that they can breathe on it,' said Professor Koen Iansen, a chemist at the University of Antwerp.


By Parker Miles Blohm

The tempera painting 'The Scream' was stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004. When it was discovered in Oslo in 2006, some of the yellow pigment had peeled off due to liquid. This incident is also thought to have accelerated the deterioration of the tempera painting 'The Scream.'

The possibility of deterioration due to light had also been pointed out, but the research team reported that 'there was almost no deterioration of the pigment due to light.' The Munch Museum, which owns the painting, is scheduled to complete renovations and reopen in 2020, and the research team recommended that 'the tempera painting of 'The Scream' should be kept in an environment where humidity can be controlled at less than 50%, and it should be removed from general exhibition.'

Regarding Munch's use of poor quality pigments, Professor Iansen said, 'I don't think Munch used poor quality pigments intentionally, but rather that the pigments he bought just happened to be of poor quality. In 1910, there were factories that produced pigments chemically, but they didn't have the same level of quality control as we have today.'

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