Qualla: Munch Museum

Munch Museum: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GuoJunjun, CC BY-SA 3.0 no. On a Sunday morning in August 2004, two armed men walked into a museum in Oslo, ordered the guards to the floor, and snapped the security cables holding two paintings to the wall. Within minutes they were gone, carrying Edvard Munch's The Scream and Madonna into a waiting car. It took two years for police to recover the paintings, and the brazen daylight theft crystallized a problem that Oslo had been debating for decades: the city owned the largest collection of Munch's work on Earth, and it did not have a building worthy of protecting it.

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Image: GuoJunjun | CC BY-SA 3.0 no

Munch Museum: A Gift from Beyond the Grave

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jodyno, CC BY-SA 3.0. Edvard Munch died in 1944, leaving his entire artistic estate to the city of Oslo. The bequest was staggering: over 1,200 paintings, 18,000 prints, six sculptures, 500 printing plates, 2,240 books, and countless other items. It represented well over half of the artist's total lif...

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Image: Jodyno | CC BY-SA 3.0

Munch Museum: The Heist That Changed Everything

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Premeditated, CC BY-SA 4.0. The 2004 robbery was not the first time The Scream had been stolen. In 1994, a different version of the painting was taken from the National Gallery during the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, and recovered three months later. But the Munch Museum theft was more violent and more p...

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Image: Premeditated | CC BY-SA 4.0

Munch Museum: A Controversial New Home

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Premeditated, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2008, Oslo launched an international architecture competition for a new Munch Museum in Bjørvika, the rapidly developing waterfront district where the Oslo Opera House had recently opened. Spanish architect Juan Herreros won the competition in 2009. Then the project stalled. B...

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Image: Premeditated | CC BY-SA 4.0

Munch Museum: Thirteen Stories of Anguish and Color

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ssu, CC BY-SA 4.0. Whatever visitors think of the architecture, the collection inside is beyond dispute. In the summer of 2021, 28,000 pieces of art were transported from Toyen to Bjørvika. King Harald V opened the new museum on October 22, 2021. Now marketed simply as MUNCH, the building rises thi...

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Image: Ssu | CC BY-SA 4.0

Munch Museum: The Scream at Home

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Munch created four versions of The Scream between 1893 and 1910 -- two paintings and two pastels. The museum holds the 1910 tempera-on-board painting, the version that was stolen in 2004 and later recovered. The other painted version, from 1893, resides at the National Museum acr...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain