Scientists Discover That Visitors to Oslo’s Munch Museum Are Destroying ‘The Scream’ by Breathing on It Way Too Much

Back away from The Scream—literally.

The famed Edvard Munch painting
is deteriorating, and it’s all because adoring visitors to Olso’s
Munch Museum are crowding its display.
To preserve the 1910 masterpiece, it would seem that, just
like the rest of us, the painting needs to practice some social
distancing.

“When people breathe they produce moisture and they exude
chlorides,” Koen Janssens, a professor at the University of
Antwerp, told the Guardian. That’s
why, he explained, paintings should generally be kept at a remove
from the breath of passerby. “You have to start working with the
relative humidity in the museum, or isolate the public from the
painting, or painting from the public, in a way that the public can
appreciate it but they are not breathing on the surface.”

The investigation into the painting’s deterioration began when
curators noticed that the yellow sections of the sky and of
the screaming figure had begun to fade to white. Now, an
international consortium of scientists has identified the cause. It
turns out Munch chose an impure tube of cadmium yellow, which can
fade and flake even in low humidity conditions. Although the
experts initially thought the painting might be suffering from
light exposure, it turns out this particular material is instead
particularly susceptible to being breathed on.

In order to crack the case, scientists employed luminescence
imaging of the piece to see how the paint was behaving and analyzed
tiny fragments of paint from both the work itself and one of
Munch’s surviving tubes of cadmium yellow (also in the Munch
Museum’s collection). The leading theory is that the paint was
tainted with chloride compounds during the chemical reaction used
to produce the pigment.

Munch created four versions of The Scream between
1893 and 1910, two in pastel and two in paint, as well as a stone
lithograph. The two painted versions were both stolen and
recovered, the 1893 version from the National Gallery, Oslo, in
1994, and the Munch Museum’s copy in 2004.

The Munch Museum, which is due to move to a huge new space this
year, will incorporate the scientists’ findings, recently published
in the journal Science Advances,
into its display of the fading work.

The post Scientists Discover That Visitors to Oslo’s Munch
Museum Are Destroying ‘The Scream’ by Breathing on It Way Too
Much appeared first on artnet News.