Stolen Munch recovered in Norway, two arrested

The artwork, named 'Historien' or 'History' in Norwegian, was retrieved undamaged, a statement said.

OSLO (AFP).- Norwegian police on Wednesday announced the recovery of a valuable lithograph by Edvard Munch which was stolen in 2009, with two men arrested. The artwork, named 'Historien' or 'History' in Norwegian, was retrieved undamaged, a statement said. It shows an elderly bearded man speaking to a young boy and was valued at the time of its theft at 240,000 euros ($244,000), but art experts said it was too well-known to be put on the market. Police said two men had been arrested at the start of the week on suspicion of handling stolen goods but not for the theft itself.

The lithograph was stolen after one of the windows of Nyborg Kunst, a leading Oslo gallery, was smashed with a rock. "My client denies the charge," Oystein Storrvik, the lawyer of one of the arrested men, told Norway's NTB news agency. The works of Munch (1863-1944) have long been targeted by thieves. In 2004, two of his masterpieces -- "The Scream" and "Madonna", with a combined value of $100 million -- were stolen in a brazen afternoon raid on Oslo's Munch museum. Ten years before that, another version of "The Scream" was stolen from Oslo's national art gallery. All the works were later recovered.

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