It is pitch-black in the gallery. Pausing at the entrance to adjust to the darkness, I see a wary young man, vulnerable and intense: one of Edvard Munch’s many self-portraits, this one from 1891–1892. Inside, twelve more paintings and prints gradually materialize on two walls. The fourth wall of the gallery is occupied by a long bench, where I ultimately rest, numbed by the darkness (or the jet lag) and the gallery’s moody soundscape. Filling the room is music from Norway’s famous black-metal band Satyricon. The fifty-six-minute original composition plays on a continuous loop. Satyricon may not be the kind of gents you’d want to bring home to your parents, but their music makes a fitting descant for Munch’s themes of love, fear, pain, and death. As an immersive experience of the kind so much in demand these days, this is one of the more successful. It works because it is relatively simple, eliciting a direct, emotional connection with the art, one that isn’t mediated by tricked-up technology. It works, like so much in Oslo’s new MUNCH Museum, because its focus is on the art—presentation, preservation, interpretation—of one of modernism’s most challenging figures.

MUNCH, which opened in October 2021, is a remarkable addition to a city not short on cultural high points. New since this summer is the National Museum of Norway (designed by Kleihues + Schuwerk), an austere “temple for our time” clad in Norway slate. In Oslo’s hip Bjørvika district, itself full of distinctive buildings, the Oslo Opera House (2008, designed by Snøhetta), with all of its glass and marble angles, appears to be sliding into the sea. The stacked mass of MUNCH (designed by Estudio Herreros) consists of, in the architect’s words, “a static podium and a dynamic tower.” Its top floors, a glassed-in aerie containing a restaurant and bar, appear to slide just off of the tower. The whole building is clad in perforated aluminum, its undulating surface responsive to the light and water effects from the inlet on which it sits.

Boasting thirteen floors of art, MUNCH—“more Munch than ever before”—holds the tremendous bequest that Edvard Munch (1863–1944) left to the city of Oslo on his death. There are some twenty-eight thousand artworks, including paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures, plus the contents of a library and research facility, totaling forty-two thousand unique museum objects. Everyone knows The Scream (1893), but there is so much more to Munch.

This is precisely the point of the exhibition “Brikker,” or “Playing Pieces.”¹ The curators’ stated aim here is to provide context for Munch’s art. The result is a deep and thoughtful survey of international modernism—paintings, prints, sculpture, photographs, installations—spanning from the decades before Munch began to work to those after his death. The landscapes of Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928), for example, with their sinuous lines and riotous colors, meld human forms and the natural world in scenes at once bucolic and pagan. The expressionistic woodcuts of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) demonstrate the move toward simplicity and abstraction that Munch later exploited so fruitfully in his own prints. A selection of collages by Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) drolly uncovers the endless variety of the detritus of modern life. Several truly odd but wonderful paintings by Hannah Höch (1889–1978) reveal the same sense of whimsy found in her photomontages. Whimsy and delight might not readily come to mind when thinking of Munch, but he too was attuned to the absurdity and discontinuity of life in the twentieth century. The 1924 portrait by Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) of his friend the composer Arnold Schoenberg evokes the kind of psychological realism drawn from personal intimacy that Munch also employed in portraits of himself, his family, his friends, and the bohemian world he frequented as a young man. That many of these artists, including Munch, were condemned in the 1930s by the Nazis as “degenerate” is another kind of context, less palatable but equally revealing.

For the most part, MUNCH is free of cant, but in the gallery on “pioneering women,” there is a brief reminder of the “underrepresentation of women” in twentieth-century art. No propitiation is necessary, however, in the face of the purposeful abstractions of the Norwegian painter Irma Salo Jæger (b. 1928) and the surreal expressionism of the Swedish painter and printmaker Lena Cronqvist (b. 1938). Sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth (1903–75) and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–84) pushed biomorphism in one direction while Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) took another. The exhibition includes several Bourgeois pieces, the strongest being Cell VIII (1998), an eight-sided enclosure made of cyclone fence containing hanging clothes, dyed canvas, and tapestry. Lurking among the drapery is a chair, a rough-hewn object in pink marble with animal ears, and the artist’s trademark spider. A compelling and uneasy combination of menace and memory, the work reveals a surprising affinity between Bourgeois and Munch with their predilection for themes of sexuality, relationships, anxiety, and loneliness.

In “Edvard Munch Monumental,” colossal canvases conceived as murals for the University of Oslo say as much about the artist’s patriotism and ambition as they do his interest in vitalism, a modernist current described by historian Jackson Lears as “more a worldview than a systematic philosophy, [one that] celebrated ceaseless possibility amid the ever-shifting flux of experience.”² Munch shows here an energy and optimism that is often obscured by the anomie and alienation seen in The Scream and his many images of women as vampires. The Sun (1910–13) is dazzling and celebratory—vitalism’s life forces are never more radiant than during the short Norwegian summers. The Researchers (1911/1925–27?) depicts a mother figure surrounded by young people exploring the seashore, a summer scene full of life, the quest for knowledge, and maternal love.

Upstairs, the collection exhibition “Up Close” focuses on the artist’s printmaking, especially the jigsaw technique he developed in works such as Man in Woman’s Hair (1896) and Two Human Beings: The Lonely Ones (1899).³ Munch was a formidable painter, but his experimental techniques in printmaking introduced freedom and spontaneity into etching, woodcut, and lithography. In later works, he began to emphasize the materiality of the image by incorporating the block’s wood grain, even to the point of obscuring the print’s subject matter. In one corner of the gallery, while I was there, an interesting experiment in hands-on learning was taking place. A large wooden table with Munch motifs carved out of its surface, designed to attract children, was mobbed with adults hastily grabbing sheets of paper and using the provided crayons to make frottage rubbings on the tabletop. The results did look remarkably like Munch’s own works—I could barely edge my way into the crowd to make my own rubbing of Young Woman on the Beach (1896).

At several points in the galleries, the curators introduce questions about the commercial aspects of art history and museum collecting: “Who collects? Who decides? How does this influence art history and our shared cultural heritage?” These questions grow more relevant with every news story about museums returning works to their countries of origin. But for every headline about “looted art” and calls for justice, there is an unspoken sense of loss for those who don’t have the means to follow this repatriated art to its new home. For an institution such as MUNCH, the chance of controversy over the removal of art is relatively remote, leaving curators with the luxury of being able to concentrate on the study of its namesake.

As stimulating as questions of context and the commercial enterprise of collecting may be, I confess that I came to a deeper understanding of Munch’s art while listening to Satyricon’s music in that tenth floor gallery. There, I was drawn repeatedly to Anxiety (1894), a painting strikingly similar to The Scream, its single howling figure replaced by a crowd led by a woman with a pale, grim face and exhausted eyes. Munch painted this work at a time that he was restlessly traveling, trying to escape a wealthy woman determined to marry him. She drove him to drink and to a sanatorium, and when he emerged, she faked her own death. At some point, she brought a pistol to one of their meetings, and an accidental shot caused Munch to lose part of a finger. As Satyricon’s sepulchral chords filled the dark room, I caught an intimation of the despair and stark terror that for Munch must have been indistinguishable from love.