New Rays

In 1914 the university in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, finally gave Edvard Munch the commission for its new ceremonial hall, after years of argument over his designs. This tall canvas stands for physics. Munch painted a nude couple inside a burst of luminous rays and crystal-like shapes, and he described the motif as light that travels like X-rays. Physics at that same university meant Kristian Birkeland, the professor who studied the northern lights and recreated them in his laboratory with a magnetised sphere inside a vacuum chamber. Munch knew of his work, which may be why rays became the subject here. The canvas was mounted in the hall in 1916, and it hangs there still.