Edvard Munch’s Freia Frieze Leaves the Chocolate Factory for the Munch Museum
For nearly a century, 12 monumental paintings by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) hung inside Oslo’s Freia chocolate factory, visible first to women workers and later to a broader factory audience. Now, for the first time, the cycle is being shown publicly at the Munch Museum in Oslo, where it appears alongside preparatory sketches in an exhibition that reframes the works as both art and social history.
The show, Edvard Munch and the Chocolate Factory, runs from May 21 to October 11, 2026. It places the Freia Frieze within Munch’s 1920s production, a period marked by formal experimentation and by the wider transformations taking place in Norway between the wars. The paintings were commissioned in 1922 by Johan Throne Holst for the women’s canteen at Freia, the central Oslo factory he led as a relatively progressive industrialist by early 20th-century standards.
Holst’s factory provided a doctor, emphasized hygiene, allowed uniforms to be washed onsite, and introduced a 48-hour work week. The commission reflected that same paternalistic but unusually expansive view of worker life. As curator Ana María Bresciani put it in a statement, the Freia Frieze and the factory’s history offer “a unique lens” on the intersections of art, industry, and gender in interwar Norway. She added that Munch pursued “alternative, moveable, and non-monumental forms,” and that the Freia commission tested the boundary between public and private art.
Originally completed in just two months, the frieze depicts an idealized Norwegian coastal summer: workers gathering fruit, fishermen heading toward boats, and figures lingering in pale blue light. The scenes are relaxed, but not empty. Their easy rhythm is undercut by the labor that sustains them, a tension the museum extends through Freia’s advertising and informational films from the 1920s and 1930s. Those materials address unions, eight-hour days, and annual leave, placing the paintings inside a broader history of labor reform.
The works were moved in 1934 to a new, larger all-gender canteen, where they remained until now. Museum director Tone Hansen said the exhibition also tells “the story of the working class,” calling it a rare opportunity for the public. In that sense, the show is not only about Munch’s paintings, but about the industrial world that commissioned them — and the changing idea of who art was meant to serve.
