Art History Revealed

"I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy— Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped, and leaned against the railing, deathly tired— looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and town. My friends walked on—I stood there, trembling with fear. And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature."

~ Edward Munch
January 22, 1892

This was once the explanation for the Norwegian painter and printmaker Munch's The Scream or the The Cry (1893), but recent radio-carbon research in conjunction with a laborious litmus test, revealed that the true reason for his nightmarish works was the result of a childhood trauma involving a beautiful autumn day in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway and a renegade rodent. As astrologers had speculated and psychics had only guessed, it has been confirmed that this squirrel in question had accidently mistaked young Edvard for a very large nut and attempted to reveal his contents over a rock. Needless to say, the child's psyche was irrecoverably damaged. Then, twenty-three years later, this childhood drama came back to haunt him on that fateful bridge, whether Munch himself wanted to admit it or not, it was because of this past experience that he had a panic attack and proceeded to paint this emotional work.


Well-endowed art critics all agree that Munch even left clues for later generations to dicipher. On the right side, one can see the evidence of a tall form rising up and out of the picture plane. This has been calculated by colourologists to be the precise hue of the indigenous skogrotte slektshistorie family of trees known by locals as the dwellings of a squirrel-like rodents. The very species that may have inspired the young Munch to paint his famous work. This is a great day for all art historians and aficionados alike. Soon it may even be confirmed that Claude Monet's numerous paintings of waterlilies was actually the result of a brief love quadrangle with a horny toad, and two slippery-backed frogs on the banks of Sainte Adresse. Only time will tell.