The Rescue Artist

For The Scream case in particular, where Hill’s role was not that of an art-loving (though crooked) amateur but of a bigwig at a world-class art museum, his research would have to be particularly thorough. There were no shortcuts. Learning about Munch was a matter of assembling a giant stack of art books and diving in. The only catch was money. Though he was preparing to play a free-spending honcho at a money-is- no-object institution—and though he supposedly intended to ransom a $72 million painting—Hill could not afford to buy the books he needed to study. Instead, he haunted the library and a bookstore near his home, where a patient manager made allowances for the tall man in the art section who read and read but never seemed to buy.

At the start, Hill knew no more about Munch than most people do. Temperamentally too conservative to care much for the modern world, he preferred paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though he made exceptions for a few works as close to the present day as the nineteenth century. The Goya portrait he had looked at in a car trunk, painted in 1805, reduced him to sputtering admiration. “Anyone with even half an eye or half a wit,” he says, “standing there, holding it, you can’t be anything but awestruck.”

He had never seen The Scream in the flesh, so to speak, and, if he failed to get it back, he might never have the chance.

Two men more different than Charley Hill and Edvard Munch would be difficult to find. Still, the gruff ex- paratrooper found himself sympathizing with the melancholy, high-strung artist. As haunted and unstable as his near-contemporary van Gogh, Edvard Munch had endured an upbringing that would have blighted the sunniest nature. When Munch was five, his mother died of tuberculosis, with her young son at her bedside. Nine years later, his older sister died of the same disease. His brother, too, fell ill with tuberculosis, but survived.

Insanity was another family curse. Munch’s sister Laura went mad and was eventually institutionalized. Munch’s grandfather had died, mad, in an asylum, and Munch himself suffered a devastating breakdown in 1908, at age 45, that left him hospitalized for eight months. His treatment included electroshock, but he emerged more or less recovered and returned to his work.

Even at his healthiest, Munch was far from robust. Sickly throughout his childhood, he had survived tuberculosis and suffered through long bouts of bronchitis. Throughout his life he suffered from panic attacks. At the time he was working on The Scream, it took all his nerve to force himself to cross a street or look down from even the slightest height. He lived in fear of inhaling dust or germs; he shrank from drafts; he was so afraid of open spaces that when he ventured outdoors he clung to the nearest wall.

“Disease, insanity and death were the angels which attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life,” Munch wrote in his journal. “I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the eternal punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.”

He learned many of those lessons from his father, a doctor who treated Oslo’s poorest residents for free but who adhered to fire-and-brimstone religious views. “When anxiety did not possess him, he would joke and play with us like a child,” Munch recalled. “When he punished us … he could be almost insane in his violence. In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.”

Munch grew to be a shy, lonely, hypersensitive young man, tall, thin, and good-looking (reputedly “the handsomest man in Norway”). In his twenties he fled puritanical Oslo for the guilty pleasures of Paris and the Black Piglet Cafe in Berlin. Here he drank too much, chased women and fled from them, and painted obsessively, late at night, in a shabby rented room cluttered with his own unfinished pictures.

The titles of some paintings from the 1890s, when Munch was in his early thirties and at his most productive, give some idea of his state of mind. He painted Despair and By the Deathbed in 1892, The Scream in 1893, Anxiety in 1894, Death Struggle in 1895.

The paintings are as bleak as the titles suggest. In comparison with Munch’s portraits of isolation and woe, Edward Hopper’s depictions of near-empty diners seem cheerful. The Sick Child, for example, shows Munch’s sister Sophie, in bed and dying, attended by her despairing mother. Sophie is wan and weak, but—and this is characteristic of Munch—the dying girl seems less anguished than the mother she will leave behind. The mother’s pain is more than she can bear; she holds her daughter’s hand, but she is past the point where she could offer any spoken consolation.

Even paintings with seemingly inviting subjects, like the 1892 street scene called Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street, are heavy-laden with grief. In Munch’s version of a spring evening, a stream of men in black top hats and women in dark dresses advance zombie-like toward the viewer, their eyes wide and staring and their heads barely more than skulls. A lone figure, depicting Munch himself, walks unnoticed in the opposite direction.

Munch’s aim in such paintings, he wrote, was to find a way to represent human “suffering and emotion, rather than to paint external nature.” The painter’s task was “to depict his deepest emotions, his soul, his sorrows and joys.” An artist was a psychologist with a paintbrush.

Freud and Munch were almost exact contemporaries. Though neither man ever mentioned the other in print, the two were engaged in the same quest. In the age of anxiety, if Freud was the great explorer, Munch was his mapmaker. Far more directly than most artists, Munch served up a kind of autobiography on canvas. His paintings put his private torments on public view.

His relations with women, for example, could scarcely have been more fraught. “His father had prayed late at night to save his son from the sinful attractions of women, flesh, and free love,” one art historian writes, “but the diabolic allures of alcohol and a bohemian life overpowered his prayers.” In 1889, when Munch was twenty-six, his father died. One of the father’s last acts was to mail his well-thumbed Bible to Munch, in Paris, in the hope that the directionless young man could yet be saved.

Women were temptresses intent on destroying men, and Munch had trouble resisting temptation. He fell in love for the first time at age twenty-two, with a married woman two years older than he was. “Was it because she took my first kiss that she took the sweetness of life from me?” he wrote later. “Was it because she lied, deceived, that one day she took the scales from my eyes so that I saw Medusa’s head, saw life as a great horror?”

Later relationships proved even more disastrous. For three years, the penniless artist carried on a tumultuous affair with a beautiful and vain woman named Tulla Larsen, a wealthy member of one of Copenhagen’s leading families. After their breakup, she lured Munch to her room by enlisting friends to tell him that she had fallen deathly ill and yearned for one final conversation. Munch arrived, and Tulla sat up in her deathbed flourishing a gun. She was not sick, she admitted, but she would kill herself if Munch refused to take her back. Munch reached for the gun, Tulla grabbed it back, and it fired. The bullet took off the top joint of the middle finger of Munch’s left hand. (Munch painted with his right hand.)

Munch later included Tulla Larsen in several works, notably in a portrait called Hatred and in another entitled Still Life (The Murderess). “I have painted a still life as good as any Cezanne,” he wrote, describing the latter work, “except that in the background I have painted a murderess and her victim.”

In between stints with Munch, Hill pored over the Getty Museum catalogue. One of the prizes in the collection, he learned, is a strange work by James Ensor called Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. The huge painting, about eight feet by fourteen feet, is an angry satire depicting the chaos that would greet Christ if he returned to the modern world. Jesus (who is depicted with Ensor’s features) is nearly swallowed up in a tumultuous crowd; political banners and advertising slogans (“Coleman’s mustard”) wave overhead; the mayor preens as if the parade were in his honor. Ensor’s masterpiece, Hill read, was one of the great forerunners of expressionism and a key step on the path that led Munch to The Scream.

Hill lit up. The Ensor painting, he figured, would be the key to his patter. The reason the Getty would pay the ransom, he’d say, is that the curators wanted to put The Scream on exhibition with Ensor’s painting. For Hill, seeing Ensor was the Aha! moment when his Getty story fell into place.

No one else would have thought so. Even without Ensor, the Getty scheme was far from simple. If Hill was prepared to play a rich American, why go to the trouble of involving a museum? Why not simply pose as a tycoon bent on assembling an art collection no one else could match? Hill contemptuously brushed aside any such