The Scream

I've seen him.

He owns The Scream by Edvard Munch, one of the four versions of that.

He paid $130 million for that, which at that time was the most ever paid for an artwork.

I mean, he's a serious, serious art collector.

And the other night at the 92nd Street Y, Andrew Ross Sorkin quoted from a part of the thesis which Leon wrote about masks and the use of masks.

And it seems to me it's a bit of a metaphor for Leon's own life.

But that knowledge of art and art history and modernism led him to want to buy The Scream because he thinks The Scream is like the preeminent example of the beginning of modernism in art history.

And it's a very important artwork because it shows the desperate nature of man and mankind and God is dead and Nietzsche and all that.

It looks like a...

What's that famous painting? Is it the Picasso, is it? The melting clocks? Is it Picasso? No, it's not Picasso, is it?

Sorry, Monet?

Monet? Salvador Dali? I don't know.

It didn't look carefully enough, obviously.

Yeah.

It's not quite this one, but that's literally, you know, the famous painting.

But it was literally just the face and like the face shape looks like the scream mask.

Mm-hmm.

And he, he thought this was the opening sal- The Scream was the opening salvo in the Modernist art movement, and therefore a very, very important work of art.

And so when it came up for sale, he basically had to have it.

[laughs]

Yeah, exactly.

So I think if I pick up on, on one project, I'm working with the Munch Museum in Oslo in Norway, so famous for the Scream painting, Edvard Munch.

Um, and I've been working with them for the last few years as their AI ethics advisor.

They essentially digitized about 7,000 works on paper.