MUNCH

MUNCH holds close to 28,000 artworks and more than 42,000 museum objects in total, described by multiple sources as the largest collection of work by a single artist held by any museum in the world. It includes two of the four surviving painted or pastel versions of The Scream (the other two are split between Norway's National Museum and a private collection), the 1910 Madonna, and the twelve Freia chocolate factory canvases - a body of decorative work with no real parallel elsewhere in Munch's output. Depth, not just fame, is the real strength: because almost the entire estate came to the museum directly from the artist rather than through the art market, MUNCH holds working states, prints pulled from the same plate at different stages, and material culture (photographs, letters, tools) that a museum assembling a Munch collection by purchase never could.

Edvard Munch died in Oslo in January 1944 and left almost everything still in his possession - some 1,100 paintings, more than 4,500 drawings and around 18,000 prints, along with sculptures, photographs, letters and printing plates - to the City of Oslo. The scale of that bequest is the reason MUNCH exists at all: no dealer, heir or auction ever dispersed the bulk of his output, because Munch himself never let it go. The city opened a museum to hold it on 29 May 1963, chosen because it was what would have been Munch's hundredth birthday, and paid for the building out of the profits of its own municipal cinemas.

That original museum stood in Toyen, in Oslo's Gamle Oslo borough, designed by the architects Einar Myklebust and Gunnar Fougner. It was expanded once, in 1994, for the fiftieth anniversary of Munch's death, and even then was already considered too small for a collection that kept growing as further gifts and transfers arrived. The pressure became sharper still after 1968, when the city separately acquired Peter Ludwig's contemporary art collection and needed exhibition space of a different kind altogether across town. A single-artist museum housing tens of thousands of objects in a building designed for a fraction of that number was, by the 2000s, not a sustainable arrangement.

Oslo opened an architectural competition in 2008 for a new museum on the Bjorvika waterfront, next to the new Opera House, and the Madrid-based Estudio Herreros, led by Juan Herreros, won it in 2009. The project then spent several years not happening. Before Oslo's 2011 municipal election the Progress Party withdrew its support over cost, and after the election the City Council voted in December 2011 to terminate the project outright, weighing cheaper alternatives such as renovating the Toyen building in place or merging the collection into the National Gallery.

The reversal came in May 2013, when the City Council approved the Bjorvika site after all. Construction began in September 2015. In the summer of 2021 the entire collection - some 28,000 artworks, including single canvases large enough to need transport by ship through the city - was moved from Toyen to Bjorvika, and the last Toyen exhibition closed on 1 October of that year. King Harald V opened the new museum on 22 October 2021, thirteen years after the competition that produced it and roughly sixty years after the Toyen building the new one replaced.

The building itself is a 60-metre tower on a three-storey podium, clad in perforated recycled aluminium panels of varying translucency, with a top section that leans outward and is visible from every side. Estudio Herreros describes the facade's changing reflectivity as deliberately 'enigmatic'; a large share of Oslo's public has called it something closer to grim. Local commentary before the museum even opened branded it, half-mockingly, the 'world's largest collection of guard rails', and descriptions ranging from 'eyesore' and 'lead-grey mastodon' to 'architectural masterpiece' have run side by side in the same press coverage since. The building was engineered to Passive House and FutureBuilt sustainability standards, with low-carbon concrete, recycled steel and seawater cooling, and is rated for a 200-year structural lifetime - none of which has settled the argument over what it looks like.

The renaming that came with the move is part of the same story. The institution now markets itself simply as MUNCH rather than Munch Museum, a shorter, more building-branded identity that arrived alongside the new address and has taken longer to bed in with some visitors and local critics than the architecture itself.

MUNCH organises its programme vertically rather than as a single horizontal suite of rooms, which is unusual for a museum of this size. The permanent collection's core sits on floor 4, Edvard Munch Infinite, where the best-known paintings are shown in rotation. Floor 6, Edvard Munch Monumental, is a dedicated double-height gallery built to hang Munch's largest canvases - including work connected to his Aula murals for the University of Oslo - at the scale he actually painted them, something the Toyen building could never do. Floor 7 combines Up Close, built around the print and woodcut collection, with an interactive display the museum calls Shadows. Floor 9 currently holds Edvard Munch and the Chocolate Factory, built around twelve canvases Munch painted in 1922 for the women's canteen of Oslo's Freia chocolate factory - decorative work commissioned for an industrial interior rather than a gallery, and the first of its kind. Floor 11, Edvard Munch Horizons, places Munch's work against the wider circle of artists he worked alongside rather than treating him as a fixed canon on his own. A research library and conservation workshop on floor 3 hold the documentation behind the collection, alongside public-facing programming. The top two floors, 12 and 13, are a restaurant and a Skybar reached by its own glass lift, run as concessions rather than by the museum directly, and are as much a reason visitors go up as the art is.

On 22 August 2004, armed and masked robbers walked into the Toyen museum in daylight, cut The Scream (the museum's 1910 tempera version) and Madonna from their wall mountings, and drove away with both. The paintings were missing for nearly two years, long enough that rumours circulated they had been destroyed. Oslo police recovered both on 31 August 2006, in what officials at the time called better condition than expected; the Scream had moisture damage to one corner. Both paintings were restored and went back on public display together on 23 May 2008.

The robbery reset how the museum thinks about security, and it is part of the background to the Bjorvika move as much as overcrowding was: a purpose-built museum gave Oslo the chance to design climate control, mounting and gallery security around a lesson the city had already paid for once. It also means the specific canvas visitors see labelled The Scream on floor 4 carries its own documented history of having been gone and away from public view for two years of the museum's own life, separate from the fame of the image itself.

Not every criticism of MUNCH is about the shape of the building. Writing in the Norwegian art-criticism journal Kunstkritikk at the museum's 2021 opening, the critic Mariann Enge raised a question that was not primarily about art at all: whether an institution acting as custodian of Munch's cultural heritage on behalf of the City of Oslo should accept sponsorship from oil and energy companies. She named Idemitsu Petroleum Norway, Aker BP and Equinor specifically as partners of the museum, and argued the question would only get louder rather than go away as scrutiny of corporate sponsorship in the cultural sector increased generally. That criticism has not been publicly answered or withdrawn by the museum in the material reviewed for this record, and it sits alongside, rather than instead of, the architectural debate as an open point about an institution that presents itself as custodian of a national artist's legacy.

Munch's own bequest is not the whole collection. MUNCH also holds separate donations from the collector Rolf Stenersen, an early and unusually adventurous buyer of Munch's more experimental work, along with material from Amaldus Nielsen and Ludvig O. Ravensberg, together spanning close to a century of art history around Munch rather than only his own hand. The museum describes its holdings in total as a fragile inheritance: prints, drawings and painted surfaces now approaching or past a century old, some of them, like the Freia canvases, having spent decades in working buildings rather than climate-controlled storage before they ever reached a gallery wall. Conservation of that material, and the ongoing digitisation of Munch's letters and writings, is carried out on the museum's own research floor rather than outsourced, which the museum treats as part of its core function alongside exhibition.

Visitors are consistently struck by the scale of the collection and say it takes longer to see properly than they expected, and the top-floor views are repeatedly singled out. Opinion splits hardest over two things that have nothing to do with the paintings: the building's exterior, which has drawn both architectural praise and open ridicule since before it opened, and, among critics rather than tourists, the museum's sponsorship arrangements with oil and energy companies.