Edvard Munch

The Scream exists in several versions. The Munch Museum counts four of them, two tempera paintings and two drawings, including a crayon version dated 1893, and estimates there are about 30 impressions of the 1895 lithograph. The motif began as a prose poem in Munch's diary in Nice in the winter of 1892, about an evening walk under flaming clouds, and the lithograph was reproduced in journals such as La Revue blanche in 1895.

In the 1890s Munch painted motifs including Vampire, Puberty and Madonna and grouped his pictures into a cycle on love, anxiety and death that he called The Frieze of Life. In the winter of 1893-94 he hired rooms in Berlin to show a series of love pictures, among them The Kiss, Vampire, Jealousy, Despair and Madonna, and in 1902 he showed 22 works around the four walls of the Berlin Secession's sculpture room. In 1940, after the German invasion, he made a will leaving his works and papers to the City of Oslo, hoping to give the Frieze a home.

Munch took up etching, lithography and woodcut in the 1890s. The art historian Curt Glaser wrote in 1922 that the woodcut became a usable artistic language only in his hands, because the image was cut directly into the block, as a painter works with a brush, and that he sawed blocks into pieces to print them in colour. Gustav Schiefler's 1907 catalogue records woodcuts cut from rough crate boards using the grain of the wood, and the Munch Museum says his Madonna lithograph exists in several hundred impressions.

From 1909 to 1916 Munch worked on the decoration of the festival hall (Aula) of the University of Oslo, eleven paintings including History, The Sun and Alma Mater. After exhibitions of his drafts caused a stir in Germany in 1913, the university board voted to acquire them, and he hung the paintings in late summer 1916.

In 1911 the jury for the University of Oslo hall rejected both Munch's drafts and Emanuel Vigeland's, and the hall was hung with yellow silk wallpaper for the university's centenary. Munch called the decision 'a victorious defeat' and began at once to paint a new, final version of The Sun in monumental format, continuing to work on some motifs until he hung the pictures in 1916.

Starting a new version straight after the rejection, and carrying on until the paintings were hung, is consistent with persistence; the 1913 German showing that helped reverse the decision was also part of the outcome. Persistence

From 1905 to 1934 Munch made hectographs, prints taken from a gelatin slab inked with a drawing in aniline dye, about 100 motifs in all. On one he wrote 'Printed on my secret press'. The museum's curators note that, unlike etching, lithography or woodcut, the method needed ingredients bought in shops and no printing plate, so he could print the images himself without a professional printer.

Choosing a method he could run alone with shop-bought materials is consistent with a need to control how his images were made and multiplied; the curators say they do not know what prompted the choice. Need for Autonomy

In November 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists, at the suggestion of the Norwegian painter Adelsteen Normann, showed 55 of Munch's works at the House of Architects. Members were outraged and the show was closed within about a week, an affair the press called the 'Munch Affair'. Munch wrote home that he could have no better advertisement, and he moved to Berlin, where he lived and worked on and off until 1908.

Reading the closure as publicity and then moving to the city where it happened is consistent with spotting an opening in a setback; this rests on one quoted letter and the move, so it is a modest inference. Opportunity Sensing