The One Who Heard
From the Whatifs Catalogue, the encyclopedia of paintings that never were. Lot of the day on Oct 20.
Created with AI, after Edvard Munch, public domain.
The One Who Heard is an imagined painting attributed, within the Whatifs fiction, to Edvard Munch (1895). It belongs to the Whatifs series of works the great masters never painted.
History and rediscovery
In his 1895 diary Munch wrote that he wanted to paint "the one who heard the scream, across the fjord". The idea was thought to have stayed a sentence. In 2024 a rolled board was found in the attic of a guesthouse in Åsgårdstrand, where the painter spent his summers: a man on the shore, one hand over his ear, turning towards a tiny figure on a distant bridge under the same blood-red sky. Sold for $88 million in 2025.
Sale
Within the fiction, the painting sold for $88,000,000 (2025). Tap the board above to replay the imagined bidding. The auction pictured below never took place.
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See also
- The Moulin Rouge at Six in the Morning, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
- The Mother Reading the Letter, Mary Cassatt
- The Wanderer, Seen from the Front, Caspar David Friedrich
Notes
- Image generated with AI from a prompt written by Whatifs. No real painting, signature or auction house is reproduced.
- Story written for Whatifs. Any resemblance to real discoveries is coincidental.
