I reach Ekeberg Park at sunset and walk along the muddy paths to find the viewpoint. The late winter sky is like a watercolour: soft blue and grey clouds layer together, with a sweeping gradient of yellow verging from tobacco stain to pale lemon above the distant, bruise-coloured hills. At the viewpoint, I look out over Oslo and listen for a scream.
In 1892, Edvard Munch took a walk in this same park as the sun was setting. Recording the experience in his diary, he wrote that he heard “a great and infinite scream through nature”. The experience became the basis of his most enduring painting.
Nobody knows if the scream was real – there was a hospital nearby – or imagined. Today, all I hear are the delighted squeals of children playing on the hillside, amid joggers and walkers traversing the leaf-strewn footpaths of the park.
As the National Portrait Gallery holds a new exhibition of Munch’s portraits, I’m in Oslo walking in the footsteps of the artist. Munch is inescapable: at Clarion Hotel Oslo, where I’m staying, an Andy Warhol version of The Scream graces the lobby – the pop artist was a huge fan – and a photograph of Marina Abramović’s interpretation greets me at breakfast.
From the viewpoint, as the sky falls in a blanket around me, the city’s prime Munch attraction is clearly visible. While the shapes of the islands and borders of the Oslofjord are recognisably the same as those in the background of The Scream, the Munch Museum – known as simply Munch – stands out amid the new modern buildings on the Bjørvika waterfront. The top of its striking tower is tilted, so said the architects, to look like it’s bowing to the city of Oslo, the inspiration for many of Munch’s works. Inside it, my guide, Sid, takes me on a tour of the extensive collection.
“Munch was unique in how he captured a shift in generations and perception,” Sid says. “He’s documenting humanity at a time when belief and institutions are collapsing.”
I’m struck by how Munch’s work, much of it over 100 years old, is still relevant today: from his ability to paint the emotional landscape of his sitters with a particular focus on mental health, to his belief that there was no separation between humankind and nature.
In the gallery, three different versions of The Scream are displayed in a dimly lit rotunda for 30 minutes at a time, to preserve their colours. One of them has water-damage in the bottom-left corner: this is one of the stolen Screams, taken by daring art thieves during a daylight robbery in 2004 and damaged during storage (it was returned in 2006). In the National Museum, another version of The Scream is on display – he made eight in total – under the watchful eyes of two security guards. Another version of the painting was stolen from this gallery in 1994, when police attention was otherwise occupied by the Lillehammer Winter Olympics. That one was only absent for 12 weeks.
Other highlights of the Munch Museum include a vast room showing sketches of the Aula paintings, a series of giant artworks Munch made for Oslo University’s ceremonial hall. They depict an abstract sun shattered into multicoloured rays, a nurturing mother on a rocky shoreline and a fisherman teaching a young boy, and are considered his masterworks. When the Nazis invaded Norway, these paintings were hidden in a mine. Munch’s work featured on the Nazis’ degenerate art list – modernist and avant garde art was considered depraved; any deviation from the norm, any challenge to the status quo, was punished. After the war, these monumental works were restored to pride of place at the university hall, which is open to the public one Saturday a month from February-May.
The next day, I take a trip to Ramme, where Munch painted two of these works. A 30-minute train ride and short taxi journey from Oslo, it’s a haven for Munch lovers. You can walk around his house and outdoor studio and along the beach. There’s something about the sound of the sea, the rocky shoreline of the Oslofjord and the apple trees that give a great sense of calm. For Munch, plagued by ill health and mental health issues all his life, that was the idea.
He bought the white house here in 1910, which remarkably is rented out to holidaymakers in summer, and kept it until his death in 1944. Inside, the carefully restored bright yellow walls and white lace curtains served as backdrops for many of his portraits. I walk past the apple trees to a rugged shoreline littered with mussel shells where interpretive boards show his paintings set against the views.
Back in Oslo, I take a walking tour of the lively Grünerløkka quarter. Munch’s family lived in several different buildings in the area, marked with plaques, and it’s in one of these that he set one of his most moving paintings, The Sick Child, inspired by his sister’s death from tuberculosis. All the colours of life are here: vintage shops and hipster cafes line up along the edge of a small central park, bright blue trams streak by and the city’s young and creative walk around, as punk-haired baristas make drinks at Tim Wendelboe’s coffee shop. I feel I could walk past the subject of one of my favourite Munch paintings, Madonna, a raven-haired woman in a red beret.
Before I leave, I pay my respects at his grave at Our Saviour’s cemetery. I wonder what he might have created were he alive today. According to walking tour guide Linda, his love of self-portraits would mean only one thing: “He would be a selfie king.”
Laura travelled to Oslo as a guest of VisitOSLO and stayed at Clarion Hotel Oslo (doubles from £147). Transport was provided by Flytoget airport express (£36 return) and the Oslo Pass, which offers local transport as well as entry into museums and galleries (from £40 for 24h).
Edvard Munch Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery 13 March-5 June (£21/£23.50 with donation)
