NORWAY: In The Scream, a figure on a bridge under a lurid twilight holds his head in his hands and screams.
The several versions of the picture have become a kind of shorthand of modern alienation and despair, icons of anxiety and hopelessness.
They reappear on pub signs and as inflatable, arty dolls. You can buy Munch Scream wallpaper, and once Dame Edna Everage wore a dress with the repeated motif.
Someone screams on a bridge at the end of the world. Little wonder we like to make fun of it, and reduce it to a kind of joke.
Munch himself returned again and again to the same obsessive images.
The artist lost his mother when he was five, and a few years later his sister died of tuberculosis. Even the bridge in Oslo which features in The Scream, close to the town abattoir and to the hospital where another mentally ill sister was incarcerated, was significant for him.
In his diary Munch wrote: "I was walking along the street with two friends. The sun was going down. I felt a touch of melancholy. Suddenly the colour of the sky changed to blood-red. I stopped walking and leaned against a fence, feeling tired to death ... I stood there trembling with fear - and I felt how a long unending scream was going through the whole of nature."
It has also been suggested that the sky in The Scream, which we might see as a vision of inner turmoil, could itself be a memory of the lurid skies and sunsets which covered the world following the explosion of Krakatoa in 1884, and which Munch witnessed and drew in his sketchbooks.
The two stolen paintings, The Scream and Madonna, are seen as founding images of Expressionism, and among the strongest examples of decadent, symbolist art. There is something awful in their overwrought, Art Nouveau-ish line, their sickly colour, their implicit malaise.
The Scream has influenced artists as diverse as Francis Bacon and Tracey Emin, Gilbert and George and Georg Baselitz.
Many of Munch's works have entered our consciousness, either on their own account or through their many derivations. The world's reaction, as much as the theft itself, might also be a kind of recognition of the works' deeper hold on us.