When people hear “Munch”, they usually think of The Scream. But a visit to MUNCH in Bjørvika quickly shows that Edvard Munch is much more than one iconic image – and that the museum itself is far more than a single-artist shrine.
Today’s MUNCH is built around three pillars: Edvard Munch as the core, contemporary international art, and European modernism. The huge collection – almost 28,000 works including paintings, prints, drawings and sketches – allows the museum to constantly rotate what’s on display. Only a fraction of it fits into the main collection exhibition, tellingly titled “The Infinite”.
A thematic labyrinth instead of a tidy timeline
Instead of walking through Munch’s life year by year, visitors enter a kind of labyrinth. Rooms are organised by themes – self-portraits, anxiety, the city, love, death – rather than chronology. You can stand in front of an early, perfectly academic self-portrait from the 1880s and, a few steps away, face a raw, almost dissolved late portrait from around 1940.
This choice reflects Munch himself. Technically, he could paint like the best of his time – detailed, realistic, very “correct”. But he chose something else: a symbolic, experimental language aimed at the inner life rather than the outer surface. Critics in the 1890s called him “sick” and claimed his figures looked like cut-out cardboard. Today, that same “wrongness” is what makes them so powerful.
The many faces of Munch
One of the most striking rooms is dedicated to self-portraits. Through them you glimpse a whole life: the ambitious teenager determined to “become a painter”, the bohemian who drank too much and slept too little, the middle-aged artist after a nervous breakdown, and finally the ageing man at Ekely during the Second World War.
The famous Self-Portrait with Wine Bottle (1906) shows a pale, tense Munch at a café table, the wine bottle almost comically oversized. Friends and collectors, many of them doctors, warned him that he would not live long if he did not change his lifestyle. A few years later he checked himself into Dr. Jacobsen’s clinic in Copenhagen – a turning point where he tried to leave both alcohol and destructive relationships behind.
In a late winter self-portrait from around 1940, painted at Ekely, the snow outside seems icy and blue while the light in the window glows warmly. The boundary between interior and exterior dissolves. The war, Munch’s close ties to Germany, and the Nazi campaign against “degenerate art” all form a tense backdrop. It is almost a miracle that his collection survived intact.
Anxiety, The Scream and the crowd
Most international visitors arrive with one question: “Where is The Scream?” At MUNCH you rarely see just the isolated masterpiece. Instead, it appears in dialogue with related works like Anxiety and Evening on Karl Johan.
In Anxiety, the familiar fjord landscape from The Scream is filled with a procession of ghost-like figures. Their faces are green, their expressions empty and slightly nauseous. It feels like a collective panic – a modern crowd drifting through a rapidly changing world of electric lights, industry and big cities.
Munch originally conceived The Scream, Anxiety, Melancholy, Madonna, Vampire, The Kiss and others as part of a larger series he called “The Frieze of Life” – “a poem about love, anxiety, sickness and death”. The museum’s thematic layout echoes that idea: paintings from different years and techniques speak to each other across time.
One room is kept almost dark. Here you meet a fragile, printed version of The Scream – a lithograph in black and white, where the famous figure appears almost more concentrated and graphic. Because the work on paper is light-sensitive, it can only be shown for short periods at a time. The darkness is a reminder that conservation is an invisible, constant battle behind the scenes.
Madonna, death and desire
Another highlight is Madonna. The title suggests the Virgin Mary, but the painting shows a naked, sensual woman with a red halo that could just as easily be a fashionable bohemian beret. In some versions, the frame included sperm cells and a tiny foetus – life, sex and death intertwined.
Reactions in Munch’s own time were mixed. Some critics found it scandalous; others, especially collectors in progressive circles, embraced it. The museum’s version of Madonna is the very painting that was stolen together with The Scream in 2004 from the old museum and later recovered with damage. Today it no longer travels abroad – it is simply too fragile.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, skeleton arms, skulls and shadowy figures appear in portraits and scenes. Death in Munch’s universe is never far away; it is part of life, not something politely kept out of the frame. This is rooted in his own story: a mother who died early, siblings lost to illness, a sister institutionalised for years. But the paintings go beyond biography. They speak to something more universal and unsettling – the feeling that love and loss, desire and destruction, always walk side by side.
A museum that keeps changing
MUNCH is not just a shrine to a dead master. The collection is so vast that new constellations are constantly possible. Works rotate in and out of “The Infinite”; temporary exhibitions explore themes like Munch and medicine, or place him in dialogue with artists such as Ludvig Karsten or contemporary voices.
Higher up in the building, the exhibition “Shadows” reconstructs Munch’s home at Ekely with a more classic timeline, interactive media and even an actor’s voice imagining Munch’s own. Together, these layers – the thematic labyrinth, the biographical timeline, the changing special shows – allow visitors to meet Munch from many angles.
For some, MUNCH is a first encounter with expressionism. For others, it is a chance to see beyond the over-reproduced Scream to an artist who tried, again and again, to paint what can’t be seen: anxiety in a city street, the moment love dissolves, or the quiet awareness that death is always in the room.
Written by ChatGPT based on my notes from a guided tour with Tonje Lieberg at the MUNCH museum.
