Inside the Munch Museum: How Oslo Rebuilt a National Icon for the 21st Century

When Edvard Munch died in Oslo in January 1944, he left almost his entire remaining body of work to the city he had spent a lifetime painting: roughly 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings and 18,000 prints, along with sketchbooks, letters and photographs. It was, by any measure, one of the largest bequests any single city has received from a single artist. Housing and interpreting that collection properly has taken Oslo the better part of eight decades, two purpose-built museums, and no shortage of public argument along the way.

From Tøyen to Bjørvika

The first Munch Museum opened in 1963 at Tøyen, timed to mark the centenary of the artist's birth in 1863. It served the city for nearly six decades, but by the 2000s its limitations — restrictive climate control, cramped galleries, security concerns following a notorious 2004 armed robbery in which The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the building and later recovered — had become hard to ignore. After years of political debate over where a replacement should stand, the city settled on Bjørvika, the redeveloped waterfront district already home to the Oslo Opera House, and construction of a new thirteen-storey museum began there in the following decade.

A Building Nicknamed for Its Shape

Designed by the Spanish firm Estudio Herreros, led by architect Juan Herreros, the new Munch Museum opened to the public on 22 October 2021. Its slightly leaning, folded silhouette earned it the working nickname "Lambda," after the Greek letter it was thought to resemble in early renderings. At around 26,000 square metres across thirteen floors, it gave the collection dramatically more exhibition space than the old Tøyen building, along with proper climate-controlled storage for works on paper, which make up the overwhelming majority of what Munch left behind and are far more light-sensitive than his paintings.

Managing a Fragile Masterpiece

That sensitivity shapes how the museum actually operates. Munch made four versions of The Scream between 1893 and 1910, in tempera, crayon and pastel on cardboard; two are held by the Munch Museum and a third by Norway's National Museum, while a fourth, in private hands, sold at auction in 2012 for close to $120 million. The pastel and tempera versions in Oslo's own collection are shown only on a rotating, restricted basis to limit light exposure. It is a reminder that even the most famous image in Norwegian art history is, physically, a fragile object on paper and board, not a fixed museum fixture — its display schedule is itself a curatorial and conservation decision, negotiated year to year.

A Contested Landmark

The project was not universally welcomed. Critics objected to its cost, its scale relative to the low-rise Bjørvika skyline, and its distance from the historic city centre, and the debate continued well after opening day. What is harder to dispute is the outcome for the collection itself: for the first time, the full range of Munch's output — not just the handful of paintings tourists come to see — has the physical infrastructure to be properly stored, studied and rotated into public view, in a city that has spent eighty years deciding how to honour what he left it.