You think you have angst! Munch Museum reopens in Oslo

Also this past week the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway reopened to the public after a 10-month long security overhaul. This was necessitated by last August’s daring daylight robbery in which art thieves entered the museum and in front of museum visitors ripped two of Munch’s most famous works off the wall and ran out. The thieves and Munch’s “The Scream” and “Madonna” remain missing (although several people are in custody in Norway in association with this robbery). If you now wish to see the remaining masterpieces of existential angst in the Munch Museum you have to first go through post-9/11 airport levels of security and the pictures themselves are behind glass and bolted to the walls! In its online version, the Oslo newspaper, Aftenposten, is calling the reopened museum, "Fortress Munch."

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is Norway’s most famous artist and a prime mover in the development of Expressionism. He also had a major influence on many artists in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) and is viewed by art historians as a key player in the development of German existentialism in art. The influence of non-Germans on German cultural movements is interesting and pervasive. Another example that springs to mind is that of the writer, Franz Kafka, who although German speaking and resident (for a time) in Berlin, was Czech.

Some of Munch’s other works include such existentially-titled paintings as “Angst”, “Self-Portrait in Hell” and a portrait of Friedrich Nietsche, the German philosopher who famously wrote that God was dead.