By ELLEN GAMERMAN

The figure at the center of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" has gone by many names: a fetus, a worm, a tadpole, a skull. It has been dubbed "the portrait of a soul" and "the face that launched 1,000 therapists."

   

 

One of the best-known images in modern art comes up for auction for the first time ever next week, with an $80 million estimate. Ellen Gamerman has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

Now, for the first time in history it is something else: an auction celebrity.

"The Scream" will be on the block at Sotheby's on May 2, the highlight of the Impressionist and modern evening sale in New York. Sotheby's experts anticipate the work will fetch more than $80 million, the highest presale figure the auction house has ever set.

The androgynous wraith grasping its cheeks in dread along an Oslo fiord, created by the Norwegian artist in 1895, is an unpredictable trophy with little precedent, famous as much for the pop-culture spinoffs and parodies it has generated as it is for its artistry. One of four versions of "The Scream" that Munch created, this is the only one not in an Oslo museum and the first to ever come up at auction. Sotheby's is betting big on the work: The auction house could either take credit for selling one of the most expensive artworks ever at auction, or risk embarrassment if its expectations prove too high.

In a rare move, Sotheby's sent the work to private homes in Asia, North America and Europe so key clients could test whether the haunting image clashed with the rest of their art collections. The piece has been removed from its frame for certain serious contenders who wanted to stare at the icon nose-to-nose. The picture recently flew to Hong Kong for 48 hours so a top collector could inspect it in person in a private room at Sotheby's offices.

Potential buyers include European executives, Asian big-spenders and Middle Eastern sheiks. Among the names most often mentioned: the royal family in Qatar, which is building a museum empire and reportedly purchased Paul Cézanne's "The Card Players" for at least $250 million not long ago. Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department in New York, noted fascination with the work in Japan, where "The Scream" is a particularly resonant image, possibly because Munch was influenced by Japanese prints.

The Many Faces of Munch's "The Scream"

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Sotheby's expert Philip Hook estimates a pool of about 10 collectors. His personal theory: Collectors don't tend to spend more than 1% of their net worth on an individual artwork. That leaves "Scream" bidders at people worth $8 billion and up.

Buzz around potential buyers has included international collectors who have successfully stalked masterpieces in the past, like Geneva-based billionaire Lily Safra, who spent $104.3 million for Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, "Walking Man I," or American cosmetics executive Ronald Lauder, who paid $135 million in the private acquisition of Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" for his New York museum. Instead of a large pool of Munch aficionados, art-industry insiders anticipate that a prized work like "The Scream" would more likely draw interest from collectors with broad tastes in blockbuster art, a list that includes Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich and the Greek shipping heir Philip Niarchos. Representatives for the collectors declined to comment.

This month, more than 7,500 people viewed the piece over five days at Sotheby's in London. The artwork sat under glass about 7 feet behind stanchions, watched by security guards. About 350 collectors saw it more intimately at a reception, though Sotheby's took the cautious step of confiscating their Champagne before allowing them to approach the work.

Popperfoto/Getty Images

When he created 'The Scream,' Edvard Munch was in a state of despair: He was turning 30, had no money and was reeling from a disastrous love affair.

Top clients have visited the picture privately at Sotheby's in New York, sitting in high-backed chairs set a short distance from the work inside a locked room. "One of the world's great collectors said, 'I could sell all my pictures, put this on my wall, put my chair here with a cup of coffee and stare at it for the rest of my life and be happy,'" says Mr. Shaw.

The picture goes on wider display to Sotheby's clients in New York starting Friday. The auction house hired a design firm to create a spot-lit installation for the work in a 10th-floor space, covering up the skylights and curtains on nearby windows and allowing the picture to glow as if lighted from within. Though Munch wanted viewers of his work to act as if in church, reverent with hats in hands, plenty of people who have seen "The Scream" haven't been able to resist slapping both cheeks and opening their mouths in a silent "O."

Monaco art dealer David Nahmad says he might bid on "The Scream" if the action stays around $80 million, though not if it soars higher. It's a fraught investment, he says, arguing that the name "Munch" is not as instantly recognizable as others and the resale value is not guaranteed: "If I have the choice to buy a Picasso or a Munch, I would prefer to buy a Picasso," he says. "Everybody knows everything about Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Monet. If you go to somebody in South America and say there's a Munch to buy, he'll say, 'Who's he?'"

The version of the "The Scream" up for sale at Sotheby's is a bright mix of 12 different colors, with the skeletal character in the foreground sporting one blue nostril and one brown one. The third in a series created between 1893 and 1910, the work was created with pastel on rough board. Some art dealers view the pastel as a mark against the work, though others say the lines and colors are more electric than even those found in the painted versions. The picture offers another standout feature: its frame, inscribed with the original 1892 poem Munch wrote that is said to have inspired the work. In it, he describes walking along that fiord, "trembling with anxiety" and sensing "an infinite scream passing through nature."

Ahead of the sale, the auction house printed limited-edition hardcover books for top clients. It produced two videos promoting "The Scream" at auction, one shot on New York's Roosevelt Island to evoke the work's waterside setting, the other a promo with sped-up images of clouds in a blood-red sky set to a throbbing synthesizer score.

Munch wouldn't have necessarily minded such a mass-media campaign. The artist, whose work once was deemed so subversive parents were warned it could give their children chickenpox, was a master of savvy marketing. The Norwegian nicknamed "Bizzarro" early in his career was one of the first artists to charge admission to view his early works. He made the move in 1892 after the Kaiser gave a speech against his paintings in Germany. Munch wasn't making money off sales, but at least he could pocket the entrance fees.

When Munch created the first version of the "The Scream," the alcoholic and chain-smoking artist was in a state of despair: He was turning 30, had no money, was reeling from a disastrous love affair and was terrified that he would succumb to the mental illness that ran in his family, says Munch scholar Sue Prideaux. The artist placed his amoeba-like figure at a popular suicide spot on Oslo's U-shaped bay where passersby could hear screams from a nearby slaughterhouse and insane asylum, Ms. Prideaux says, adding that Munch's sister, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was housed in that asylum. One possible misperception about the work is the scream itself: many art historians say the character is not howling, but blocking out the sound of screams around him.

Art historians call "The Scream" Munch's reaction to Impressionism, which seemed to bore him—he complained it just showed people knitting or reading—and heralded in an era of Expressionism in which artists attempted to dissect their own psychological cores. Before creating "The Scream," Munch had been reading many of the same books and attending the same Paris hospital lectures as Sigmund Freud, says Ms. Prideaux. In the years before "The Scream," Nietzsche had famously philosophized that "God is dead," paving the way for modern explorations of alienation.

The image quickly caught the attention of the freethinking art crowd in Europe. To make the most of the excitement, Munch created black-and-white lithographs so the image could be printed in European magazines and sold individually. He refused to explain the work, further fueling public fascination.

Few Americans have seen "The Scream" in person: The version being sold at Sotheby's was last in the U.S. at Washington's National Gallery of Art in the early 1990s.

In recent decades, the skeletal figure has been reproduced everywhere from ice-cube trays to political posters. A symbol of universal angst, it graced the front of Time magazine's 1961 "Guilt and Anxiety" issue. In more recent years, it has found new life as an ironic mash-up, suggested in the "Home Alone" scream and copied in a cartoon of Homer Simpson as the tortured Nordic soul.

Director Wes Craven says he was first drawn to the howling ghost-face mask that became the star of his "Scream" movies because it reminded him of the Munch image, one of his favorite artworks. "It's a classic reference to just the pure horror of parts of the 20th century, or perhaps just human existence," he says.

Such global exposure has made the work a target. London bookies have offered 20/1 odds on this work getting stolen before the auction. Two other versions of "The Scream" were stolen from Oslo museums. In 1994, thieves brought a ladder to a window at the National Gallery on the first day of the Olympics in Lillehammer and took the work, leaving a note in its place thanking the museum for its lousy security. A decade later, masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum and nabbed "The Scream" and another Munch work. (Mars Inc., which used "The Scream" in advertising for dark-chocolate M&Ms, offered two million M&Ms for the work's return, though that candy reward has not yet been delivered per instructions by Norwegian authorities, according to the company.) Both works were eventually recovered.

Sotheby's has long been laying the groundwork for the Munch market, engineering eight of the top 10 Munch sales in recent years. "We have quite consciously and strategically attempted to build his profile and build a global marketplace," says Mr. Shaw. In 2008, Sotheby's sold "Vampire," a moody painting of a flame-haired woman kissing a man's neck, for $38 million, the artist's auction record. It went to an American after a contest against Russians and others, according to people familiar with the bidding.

But because so few Munchs have come up for auction, collectors don't have much of a sales history to rely on, which could hurt bidder confidence. "Fertility," a Munch pastoral scene that adorned a 2010 Christie's catalog cover, failed to sell at all.

New York art dealer David Nash, who ran Sotheby's international Impressionist and modern department for many years, says that though he expects the work to fetch a high price, he's still surprised by the auction house's "Scream" strategy. "There doesn't seem to be much justification for such a high estimate," he says. "They'd be better off to put a more realistic estimate and let the market determine what the final price is going to be."

Others are more bullish: Skate's Art Market Research, a global art market analyst, estimates the work will sell between $92.5 million and $123.4 million, a figure it arrived at in part by looking at sales of other famous works by artists such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. The standing record for a piece at auction was set in 2010, when Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust" fetched $106.5 million at Christie's. Auction houses keep raising the stakes: This spring, Christie's and Sotheby's Impressionist, modern and contemporary sales are sprinkled with works priced to sell for more than $20 million, estimates rarely ventured a decade ago.

The owner of "The Scream," Petter Olsen, a Norwegian real-estate developer and shipping heir, is trying to win big with the sale. He waived a price guarantee—an arrangement often used in the sale of high-profile items where the auction house assures the seller a minimum sum in exchange for a larger commission.

Mr. Olsen, who through Sotheby's declined to be interviewed, grew up with the work in the living room of his childhood home. It belonged to his father, Thomas Olsen, a patron and neighbor of Munch's in the tiny Norwegian town of Hvitsten. During World War II, Thomas Olsen hid this "Scream" and dozens of other Munch works in a remote hay barn to protect them from the Nazis, who were torching art they declared degenerate.

Over its lifetime, the picture has belonged to just three families. It was originally owned by a German coffee magnate, who probably commissioned the work. Mr. Olsen has said he is selling it in order to fund a museum of Munch's work in Hvitsten to open next year.

In recent years, the international spotlight has shown brightly on the artist. A Munch exhibit drew more than 486,000 visitors to the Centre Pompidou in Paris last year and opens at London's Tate Modern in time for the summer Olympics. Next year marks the 150th anniversary of Munch's birth, an occasion commemorated by a major joint Norwegian museum exhibition (the event has its own Twitter feed).

There may be a physiological reason for the visceral reaction to that figure with its cartoonish skull and gaping mouth. Harvard neurobiology professor Margaret Livingstone found in her research on macaque monkeys that neurons in the brain respond to exaggerated features—huge eyes or tiny noses—more than to common ones. "That's why I think a caricature of an emotion works so well," she says. "It's what our nerve cells are tuned to."

Munch enthusiasts see a simpler explanation for the picture's grip: "A scream is a very human thing," says Karen Nikgol, a co-founder of the Oslo contemporary art space NoPlace. "The inner sorrow or the inner anguish and inner pain, that's timeless."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 27, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Selling 'The Scream'.

Money isn't everything.

Or wait — is it? Given the transformation of the quaint old art world into today’s immense and mighty art industry, that maxim holds about as much water as a Conceptual Art sieve.

With the traditional roles of curator and dealer eroding, hands are wringing about the growing part that money plays in both the economic and cultural currency of art. Consider the following synchronicity: a show of the visionary midcentury artist Forrest Bess is included in the latest Whitney Biennial; at the same time, another show of the artist’s work is up at Christie’s in Midtown.

But Amy Cappellazzo, who put together the Christie’s show of the late Mr. Bess’s work, does not see a conflict in investing things with more than one kind of value. As the chairwoman of postwar and contemporary development at Christie’s, Ms. Cappellazzo started off in the art world as a curator, but found herself drawn to ways of merging her curatorial sensitivity with her entrepreneurial drive.

And more than 10 years after joining Christie’s, she has even come up with something akin to a religion about it, however irreligious it may sound.

“I believe in the power of objects,” she said, stating the credo of what may someday come to be down as Cappellazzism. “I am a pretty earthly creature myself, and I don’t have a lot of spiritual yearnings or distractions.”

Appropriately for someone so grounded in the material world, Ms. Cappellazzo has on her desk a hunk of terra firma itself: an attractive fist-size formation of quartz crystal. It is, as she will frankly admit, nothing special.

The crystal was given to her as a casual gift by an acquaintance; it has no sentimental value. She holds no beliefs that it channels new-age energy from the universe to her chakras. Clear quartz is a very common crystal, and her specimen has no marked trait to make it special: it’s not huge, or strikingly shaped, or colored, or perfectly clear. It does not have any facet that imbues quartz with value.

“It’s pretty modest,” she said. “In a way, it is a dumb rock. But that is sweet. I kind of like that. So the thing is, it is totally phenomenological. Like, it is something if I think so: this dumb rock could actually be imbued with tremendous power if I wanted it to be.”

Not that it doesn’t have its assets.

“It’s a good nervous fetish toy,” she said. “Sometimes I hold it when I am on the phone doing a deal or I have to really think about something long and hard. You kind of rub it. You wear it down a bit. It is also a little sharp, so it stings back at you, puts you in your place. And it never disappoints in terms of the way it looks. It is weighty and has presence, and it never gets dusty or fingerprinty. It requires nothing from me.”

So, mundane or not, the crystal is literally a touchstone for Ms. Cappellazzo’s brand of materialism: the belief that, simply put, only matter matters. Still, she went so far as to liken it to a rosary or mezuza, insofar as she is drawn to things that represent bigger ideas.

“I am just interested in the artifacts of a religion or culture, the remains of it, rather than it itself,” she said. “What are the visuals they left behind? That’s  usually more my question. You know, is there any good food associated with it?”

“It’s funny,” she added. “I am a hard-core materialist more than a spiritualist, if you are putting me on the continuum. But if this is what I picked to talk about, I am clearly not that materialistic because it is not very interesting or special.”

In the end, something is worth only what you invest in it, whether the currency is one the world agrees on or a personal one that is valueless to others. Money isn’t everything. Meaning is.

 

Eager to surprise her new husband, Mrs. Pincus said, she sweet-talked a concierge at the hotel to tell her everything he could about Moore. She learned that the artist had tea delivered to his room early every morning. That night she slipped the concierge a note to go on Moore’s tea tray telling him what fans she and her husband were and asking him if they could possibly meet.

“The next morning the phone rang,” Mrs. Pincus went on. “David answered it and said, ‘It’s a man, and it’s for you.’ He wasn’t happy.” The caller was Moore, who invited the couple to breakfast.

For David Pincus, a clothing manufacturer, and his wife, that meeting — followed by countless visits to Moore’s home and studio in England — began a lifelong passion for artists and for collecting. Over a 50-year marriage the couple got to know many of the biggest talents of their day: Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Mark di Suvero, Claes Oldenburg, Anselm Kiefer and Jeff Wall.

The couple also became involved with museums like the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they served on boards, gave money and donated as well as loaned these institutions countless works of art.

Mr. Pincus died in December, and now Mrs. Pincus is selling a significant portion of her collection at Christie’s in New York on May 8 and 9, including seminal examples of paintings by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning: Abstract artists who are all the rage now. The collection is expected to bring a total of about $100 million.

Mrs. Pincus said the decision to hold an auction has been difficult. “Our foundation needs money,” she explained, referring to the Pincus Family Foundation, which supports various causes including pediatric AIDS initiatives, museums and hospitals.

Laura Paulson, a deputy chairwoman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, knew the couple for nearly 30 years. “They had a boundless appetite for art and would go all over the world buying from artists and from galleries,” she said. “David had an intuitive eye.”

Often their purchases reflected current events, Ms. Paulson explained. For example, in 1965, when the Institute of Contemporary Art organized Warhol’s first museum retrospective, the couple ended up buying his “Sixteen Jackies” (which they sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $15.7 million).

“Responding to the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the couple also bought eight Warhol paintings of electric chairs,” Ms. Paulson added. Over the years they sold or donated them to museums.

Top among the paintings up for sale is a 1961 Rothko, “Orange, Red, Yellow,” which the Pincuses bought from the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1967. Measuring nearly 8 feet by 7 feet, the painting is unusually large and of vibrant orange and reds. It is estimated to sell for $35 million to $45 million.

There have not been many paintings by Pollock at auction recently, and Christie’s will be selling “No. 28,” from 1951, one of his combinations of drip and painting in shades of silvery gray with red, yellow and shots of blue and white. Its estimate is $20 million to $30 million.

The auction will also include Newman’s, “Onement V,” from 1952. The last of a series of five paintings, it is the only one that is not in an American museum. The canvas, of rich blues, is expected to bring $10 million to $15 million.

Christie’s will also be selling the Pincuses’ de Kooning paintings and sculptures. One of the paintings, “Untitled V,” from 1983, was included in the recent de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It is expected to bring $4 million to $6 million.

Asked why she thinks there is such a craze right now for abstract art, Mrs. Pincus paused and said: “I have no idea. When we started out, our friends said: ‘Are you crazy? Why are you putting that junk in your house?’ “

WORKS ON THE WATERFRONT IN BROOKLYN

A series of rectangular modules fashioned from galvanized steel, acrylic, Douglas fir, glass and plastic currently sits in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of its Biennial. The work of Oscar Tuazon, born in the United States and based in Paris, “For Hire,” as the installation is called, is not just a visual environment; it has its practical uses too. On May 20 it will move to the Whitney’s fourth floor, where it will function as a runway for a fashion show by K8 Hardy, founder of the feminist art collective LTTR.

For his next act Mr. Tuazon is creating three site-specific sculptures for Pier 1 at the new Brooklyn Bridge Park. On view from July 19 through April 26, the works will incorporate local trees, and like the sculpture at the Whitney they will be functional as well as interactive. (One will serve as a passageway along the pier.)

Having site-specific installations is a first for the park, for Mr. Tuazon and for the Public Art Fund, which has organized the project.

“We know that Brooklyn is an incubator for young artistic talent, so this is especially appropriate,” said Nicholas Baume, director of the Public Art Fund. “Michael Van Valkenburgh’s vision for Brooklyn Bridge Park has created one of the most extraordinary new landscapes in the middle of New York City, and now, for the first time, one of our most exciting emerging artists has the chance to respond to it.”

Mr. Tuazon’s installation is just one of many projects on the Public Art Fund’s spring and summer schedule. Perhaps the most unusual will occupy the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, on Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, from June 20 to Aug. 26. A twin-engine airplane rotating on its own axis, called “How I Roll,” is the first public art project in America for the Italian artist Paola Pivi. “It will be one of those projects that stops people in their tracks,” Mr. Baume said.

Christieís Images, Ltd.

“Chinquapin, 1967” by Forrest Bess shows how he was influenced by his surroundings on the Gulf of Mexico.

The art of Forrest Bess (1911-77), like that of Vincent van Gogh, may be in danger of being overtaken by his life story. Especially now, when the work of this eccentric visionary painter — who spent the bulk of his maturity as a fisherman on the Gulf of Mexico, living on a spit of Texas beach — is having an especially intense New York moment.

An Eccentric World

The current Whitney Biennial includes a show within a show of 11 Bess paintings, organized by the sculptor Robert Gober; it proffers Bess as a kind of foundational artist of our time. And an additional 40 of his paintings can be seen in “A Tribute to Forrest Bess,” an exhibition at Christie’s that is occasioned by a private sale of those works for a single seller. (It makes for the rather uneasy sight of an auction house acting like a commercial gallery handling what is tantamount to an artist’s estate.)

The facts of Bess’s life are nothing if not sensational. They include isolation, poverty, recurring visions — Bess said that he merely copied motifs that had appeared to him in dreams since childhood — and even self-mutilation. In the late 1950s, convinced that uniting the male and female sides of his personality would guarantee immortality, Bess attempted to turn himself into what he called a “pseudo-hermaphrodite” through two acts of painful self-surgery that yielded a small vaginalike opening at the base of his penis.