In December 1943, an explosion on Oslo's waterfront shattered windows across the entire city. It also, in a single afternoon, destroyed the masterwork of one artist and set in motion the death of another. Both had spent decades circling each other — as rivals, as contemporaries, as men shaped by the same small, intense world of Norwegian art. And both were connected, through bonds of blood and bitterness, to a third.
This is the story of Gustav Vigeland, his brother Emanuel, and Edvard Munch — and of the strange coincidence that brought all three together one last time on 19 December 1943.
Berlin in the 1890s: a sculptor, a painter, and a dangerous woman
The threads begin in Berlin. In 1895, a 26-year-old Gustav Vigeland arrived in the city on his way to Florence. He was broke, ambitious, and already developing the muscular, emotionally charged style that would eventually fill an entire park in Oslo.
Berlin was then the gathering point for Scandinavian artists, and Vigeland quickly fell in with the bohemian circle at the wine tavern Zum Schwarzen Ferkel — the Black Piglet.
The group included the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, and a 32-year-old Norwegian painter named Edvard Munch. The two Norwegians shared a room and a studio. They visited museums together by day and drank with the bohemians at night. Przybyszewski was so taken with Vigeland's sculptures that he wrote the first monograph ever published about the young sculptor.
At the centre of this circle was Dagny Juel, a Norwegian woman from Kongsvinger who had come to Berlin with Munch. She was a pianist, author, and an irresistible presence — Strindberg called her Aspasia, after the legendary courtesan of ancient Athens.
She would marry Przybyszewski, but the men around her were not indifferent.
According to Ketil Bjørnstad's biography of Munch, Vigeland once threw a clay bust of Dagny out of a window in an attempt — allegedly — to hit her. Another account, from the guide at Vigeland Museum, puts it differently: Vigeland had been sculpting a portrait bust of Munch, and during a furious argument smashed it to pieces. He never made another one.
Whatever the exact details, something broke between them in Berlin. The friendship survived, but only just — and never without an edge. According to Vigeland Museum guide Marte Grette, the two had a relationship that was "on and off," and the rumour persists that they were involved with the same woman during their time in the city.
The Berlin period gave both artists something. Munch found in Przybyszewski's circle the emotional vocabulary for works like Madonna and Vampire. Vigeland absorbed new impulses that pushed him beyond Scandinavian naturalism toward the expressive, sometimes anguished figure groups that would define his early career. They were presented together at the Artists' Autumn Exhibition in Copenhagen as "the two great" Norwegian contemporary artists.
Dagny Juel herself did not survive the world she had moved through. After marrying Przybyszewski, she published plays and short stories, promoted Scandinavian art in Germany and Poland, and had two children — but the marriage was turbulent, marked by her husband's infidelity and chronic lack of money.
In June 1901, while travelling to Tbilisi in Georgia with a friend of the couple, Władysław Emeryk, she was shot dead by him before he turned the gun on himself. She was 34. The circumstances have never been fully explained.
Today her childhood home in Kongsvinger houses the Women's Museum, and she is remembered as a feminist icon — a fate that would have bewildered the men at the Black Piglet.
But from here, the brother's and the painter's paths diverged.
Emanuel: the younger brother in the shadow
Six years younger than Gustav, Emanuel Vigeland had grown up in his brother's wake. Gustav had encouraged him to draw as a child, and Emanuel entered the Royal Art Academy in Oslo in 1894. He studied in Copenhagen and Paris, and travelled to Italy, Spain, and England, where he fell in love with frescoes and stained glass — particularly the great cathedral windows at Chartres.
Where Gustav worked in stone and bronze, Emanuel worked in light. He became one of Norway's first and finest practitioners of the art of stained glass, developing a deeply personal style influenced by the English Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau, characterised by dark, intensely glowing colours and a symbolic visual language.
The relationship between the brothers was not easy. Emanuel created works that Gustav felt were too similar to his own, and in 1902 Gustav actually sued his younger brother. The conflict never fully healed.
Emanuel would spend his life as a respected but less famous artist, always aware of his brother's towering public presence. His posthumous revenge, if that is what it was, came in the form of Tomba Emmanuelle — his self-designed mausoleum at Slemdal, where visitors must bow under a low door to enter, passing directly beneath the urn containing his ashes.
The Aula competition: Emanuel versus Munch
In 1911, the University of Oslo's new Aula — the ceremonial hall — stood ready, but its walls were bare. A competition was announced to decorate the space, and what followed was one of the bitterest cultural disputes in Norwegian history: the Aulastriden, or Aula conflict.
The field was eventually narrowed to two main contenders: Emanuel Vigeland and Edvard Munch. Emanuel submitted designs that were more dramatic, more overtly symbolic — in keeping with his style as a church decorator. Munch proposed something different: monumental paintings that were personal, experimental, and rooted in landscape and the human condition.
The debate raged for years, with vicious attacks in the press. Caricatures depicted Munch's work as if painted by an animal dragging its tail across the canvas.
But Munch had powerful allies, above all the art historian Jens Thiis, and he was a formidable lobbyist in his own cause. He exhibited his proposals in Germany, where they were acclaimed, and brought back glowing reviews to strengthen his case at home.
Munch won. His eleven paintings, with the radiant The Sun as the centrepiece, were installed by 1916.
He later said the sun motif was inspired by the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals — a remarkable echo of the very tradition that defined his rival's art.
Emanuel, defeated, turned back to what he did best: glass.
The rose window: Emanuel's masterpiece
Between 1916 and 1920, Emanuel Vigeland created his greatest work: the rose window for Olav V's Hall in Akershus Castle. Commissioned during the restoration of the medieval fortress, the window depicted Agnus Dei — the Lamb of God with the victory banner — surrounded by the Tree of Life, the Virgin Mary, and Nordic saints from Norway's age of greatness: St Hallvard protecting a pregnant woman in the Drammensfjord, St Sunniva, St Olav, and others.
The window was made of hundreds of pieces of hand-blown glass, coloured with metallic salts and painted with Emanuel's signature technique using silver stain (silbergelb), which gave the glass a luminous, almost supernatural quality. The soapstone framework — 56 profiled stones — was cut from Viken quarry in Mysen.
It was Emanuel's answer to the Aula: if Munch could have the university, then he would have the castle.
1943: the year everything converged
Gustav Vigeland died on 12 March 1943, at the age of 73, in the museum-studio that Oslo municipality had built for him in exchange for his life's work. He had spent his final decades in near-total seclusion, devoted entirely to the sculpture park that bears his name.
Munch, now 80 years old, was living alone at his estate Ekely on the outskirts of Oslo, surrounded by thousands of his own paintings. The German occupation weighed heavily on him; shortly after the invasion in April 1940, he had changed his will, fearing the Nazis might seize his property.
Emanuel, 68, was still working on the frescoes inside his mausoleum at Slemdal — the 800-square-metre painting Vita that depicts human life from conception to death, the work that would occupy him until his own death five years later.
Then came 19 December.
The explosion
At 2:45 in the afternoon, during the unloading of the German cargo ship D/S Selma at Filipstad harbour, something went wrong. The ship was carrying approximately 1,200 tonnes of military ammunition — rifle rounds, machine gun cartridges, hand grenades, and heavy artillery shells. The first explosion was followed by more, and the detonations continued through the afternoon.
The blast was catastrophic. Sixty acres of the Filipstad harbour area were flattened. The swimming stadium was destroyed — only the diving tower remained standing.
The fires spread to the residential buildings at Framnes and Skillebekk, and the apartment blocks along Munkedamsveien were reduced to something resembling bombing ruins.
Across the city, approximately 90,000 square metres of window glass in some 1,600 buildings were shattered. The shock wave was felt as far away as Nordmarka. At least 38 Norwegians died, along with an estimated 75 Germans, and over 400 people were injured.
Nobody knows what caused it. It may have been a pure accident, or it may have been sabotage by German anti-Nazis before the Selma left Danzig.
Two artists, one afternoon
On Akershus Castle, overlooking the harbour, Emanuel Vigeland's rose window was blown out. The soapstone framework held, but the glass — the hundreds of hand-painted, silver-stained pieces depicting saints and lambs and the Tree of Life — was shattered.
Emanuel's masterpiece, the work that had defined his career as Norway's foremost glass artist, was gone. He was alive to witness it. He would die five years later, in December 1948, without seeing the window restored.
Some ten kilometres away, at Ekely, the 80-year-old Munch was shaken from his bed by the blast. His house sustained damage from the explosion.
But rather than retreat indoors, the old painter went out into the cold December darkness. The sky over Filipstad was lit by the enormous fires — an unearthly light illuminating the winter night.
He painted what he saw: a watercolour known simply as Explosion, one of his very last works.
Standing outside in the wet cold to capture the scene, Munch caught a respiratory illness. He never recovered. Five weeks later, on 23 January 1944, Edvard Munch died at Ekely.
The Nazis, whom Munch had despised, gave him a state funeral against his family's wishes and turned it into a propaganda event.
Afterlife
For decades, the rose window in Olav V's Hall stood empty, its stone framework holding nothing but clear glass where Emanuel's saints had once glowed. It was assumed the glass was gone forever.
Then, in 1999, during preparations for the castle's 700th anniversary, something remarkable happened: four large and five small panels of the original stained glass were found during a routine attic clear-out. They had survived the explosion after all — removed at some point and stored away, then forgotten.
And in 2003, inside Emanuel Vigeland's own mausoleum at Slemdal, workers discovered a hidden room on the loft. Inside were Emanuel's original sketches and drawings for the rose window — designs that had been unknown to the museum.
Together, the recovered glass panels and the rediscovered drawings made a full restoration possible.
The glass was sent to Glasmalerei Peters Studios in Germany, specialists in historic stained glass. The soapstone was sourced from the very same quarry in Mysen that Emanuel had used in 1919. The coloured glass came from Lamberth Glasshütte in Waldsassen — the same German glassworks where Emanuel had ordered his materials a century earlier.
In April 2023, eighty years after the explosion, the fully restored rose window was unveiled by the Riksantikvar in Olav V's Hall.
The thread that connects them
There is no grand theory here, no hidden meaning. But the coincidences are striking enough to stay with you, especially if you are standing in Oslo trying to make sense of the city's art history.
Three men from the same generation, from the same small country, entangled by rivalry, kinship, and the same restless ambition to create something monumental.
Gustav Vigeland, who built a park of 200 sculptures and died nine months before the explosion.
Emanuel Vigeland, who created a masterpiece in glass and lived to see it destroyed.
Edvard Munch, who went outside to paint the catastrophe and died because of it.
And at the centre: one afternoon in December 1943, when 1,200 tonnes of German ammunition exploded on the Oslo waterfront and, in a few terrible hours, shattered the work of one artist and extinguished the life of another.
The rose window glows again in Akershus Castle. Munch's Aula paintings hang in the university. Emanuel's mausoleum waits on Slemdal, dark and echoing, for those who know to look.
Sources: Vigeland Museum (guide Marte Grette, November 2025 lecture), Forsvarsbygg, Oslo Byleksikon, Munchmuseet, Norsk biografisk leksikon, Norsk kunstnerleksikon, Ketil Bjørnstad: The Story of Edvard Munch. Course materials from Oslo Guidekurs 2025–2026.
