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Even before he stole it, Pål Enger was haunted by “The Scream”. A boy from a violent home, he stood in front of Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting and felt it spoke to him, that pale figure clasping its head in its hands, tortured by the red-yellow sky, by the unspooling sea, by everything and nothing.
“My obsession with this picture started the first time I saw it,” Enger said in a Sky documentary about his 1994 theft of the work from the National Museum in Oslo. “As soon as I got close to the picture I got an extraordinary feeling — of anxiety. I had such an intense connection with ‘The Scream’ right away. And it’s never left me.”
Enger, who has died in Oslo aged 57, was not the only person who lifted “The Scream”: a 1910 painted version (Munch made four, including two pastels) was stolen in 2004 from the city’s Munch Museum. But its cry resonated throughout his life.
Born in 1967, he grew up in the Norwegian capital’s rough eastern suburb of Tveita, where he fell in with local criminals, graduating from stealing chocolate to smash-and-grab jewellery raids. Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone from The Godfather inspired him, a Sicilian crime boss warming up frigid Oslo. “I did so much crime in my twenties that I had everything,” Enger said: cars, boats, money, women. “But I wanted more . . . I most wanted to show the world I could pull off something huge.”
The irony was Enger had a legitimate way of doing that. He was a promising footballer who played for Vålerenga, a top-flight club, and teammates thought he had potential. But as one said in the documentary: “[He] got some other interests.”
Those included stealing “The Scream”. Unfortunately, for all the sangfroid and skill that he later professed, at his first attempt in 1988 he stole the wrong painting. He did get a Munch from his break-in — the work called “Love and Pain”, also known as “Vampire” — but not the one he wanted. “We took the wrong fucking picture . . . It was just awful . . . Talentless.”
Still, four years in prison gave him plenty of time to improve his felonious skills and plan a heist of the correct painting. (Repent, not so much.)
This time it was more of a game, the sort of plot you might find in a movie. The montage: Enger reading about legendary thefts, casing the museum, hiring a henchman to commit the crime and, most importantly, to leave a postcard in the gallery scrawled with: “Thank you for bad security.”
Grey CCTV footage shows nothing quite so cinematic: the henchman and a sidekick climb a ladder propped outside a museum window, one falls off, scrambles back up. Glass breaks, they enter, the painting falls to the ground beneath the ladder.
Enger knew the police had nothing on him and he taunted them with fake tips implicating himself. He even announced his son’s birth in the local newspaper with a swipe: “Oscar is born with a Scream!” (He was later divorced and is survived by four children.)
The story of the painting’s recovery involved the British police, a Norwegian art dealer and a Vietnam war veteran pretending to work for the Getty Museum in LA. The latter, really art detective Charles Hill, posed as an interested buyer and for some reason Enger and his associates believed a global museum wanted to pay for a hot painting.
They led him to the picture, stashed in the dealer’s summerhouse, and Enger was later arrested and sentenced to six years and three months, Norway’s longest-ever stretch for theft. Hill joked: “‘The Scream’ was stolen by a bunch of Oslo no-hopers. I suppose you could say it was Norwegian organised crime: two men and a ladder.”
As was perhaps inevitable for a man sufficiently un-self-aware to claim, regarding his prosecution, “I play by the rules, they don’t play by the rules,” Enger spent the rest of his life in and out of prison, at least once more for art theft. But the media also came calling: last year Sky broadcast The Man Who Stole The Scream.
It was during a later spell in prison that Enger began to paint and worked towards his own exhibition in 2011. His work was inspired, or perhaps infected, by Munch: in one picture, the screaming figure is transparent against streams of blue and rust.
Enger never escaped “The Scream”; it kept popping up in his life and in his art — a memory he couldn’t exorcise. His claim that his theft was responsible for its popularity was risible. But in the future history of the painting, for as long as people look at it, Enger will always play a role, the ghost of the theft. The question is, then, who’s haunting who?
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