Edvard Munch’s Public Commissions Reveal a Civic Side Long Overlooked
At the Munch Museum in Oslo, a new exhibition is reframing Edvard Munch (1863–1944) through the works he made for shared spaces rather than private contemplation. Edvard Munch and the Chocolate Factory, on view through October 11, places his public commissions at the center of the story, from the University of Oslo’s Aula to the Freia Chocolate Factory. The result is a portrait of Munch as an artist who wanted his images to circulate widely, and to speak to workers, students, and city audiences alike.
One of the exhibition’s most striking objects is Workers on the Building Site (1931–33), a preparatory sketch for an unrealized decoration for Oslo City Hall. The work was found after Munch’s death outside his studio at Ekely, reportedly crumpled in snow and ice, and nearly lost to history. Its presence in the show underscores a larger argument: Munch was not only the anxious, inward-looking painter so often invoked in popular accounts, but also a civic artist with a clear public ambition.
That ambition was already visible in the Aula decorations, completed in 1916 for the University of Oslo’s ceremonial hall. The cycle of 11 monumental paintings includes The Sun, with its radiant disc rising above the sea, and The History, in which an older man passes knowledge to a boy. Munch said he wanted to create “a complete and independent world of ideas” that would be “distinctively Norwegian and universally human.” He was not initially invited to the competition, but eventually entered after expressing interest, then worked through a period of renewal following eight months in a Copenhagen clinic after a mental breakdown in 1908–9.
The exhibition also traces how Munch’s public art evolved in the 1920s. On April 6, 1922, he received an invitation from Johan Throne Hols, director of the Freia Chocolate Factory, to make works for the women’s canteen. Munch completed 12 paintings in what he said was just two months. They depict summer life in a coastal town: women gathering fruit, children on a street, men loading goods onto boats. The palette is loose and bright, with yellows, greens, blues, and reds that soften the industrial setting without denying it.
In 1934, those paintings were moved into a new all-gender canteen designed by Ole Sverre. Plans for additional works for the men’s canteen were never realized. Together with the Aula cycle, the Freia commission shows Munch thinking beyond the studio wall. As he wrote in 1929, it was “the time of the worker,” and he wondered whether art would again belong to everyone. The exhibition suggests that for Munch, that question was never abstract — it was built into the architecture of public life.
