Munch Museum

Edvard Munch could not let his own pictures go. He called them his children, kept the versions he refused to sell, and painted the same haunted images again and again. When he died in 1944 he left the whole hoard to the city of Oslo, around 1,100 paintings, 18,000 prints and thousands of drawings, the core of everything he ever made. The city built a museum around it, opened in 1963.

That made Oslo the one place to see Munch whole, from the several versions of The Scream to The Sick Child and the brooding Madonna. On a Sunday morning in August 2004 two armed men walked in and pulled a Scream and the Madonna off the wall in front of visitors. The paintings were gone for two years before police recovered them in 2006, scarred but repairable.

In 2021 the collection moved into a 13-storey tower on the Oslo waterfront, called simply Munch, where the fragile works rotate in and out of the light a few at a time.