For everyone else, the sunset that evening appears to have been quite ordinary. After all, Edvard Munch’s companions kept right on walking. Munch himself, however, was overwhelmed. Abandoned, he leaned alone on the path-side fence, trembling at what he saw: a blood-red sky licked by flames, a fiord of blue-black water. And then Norway’s troubled artist sensed, as he put it, an infinite scream passing through nature. He would later paint that panicked interval, what Americans know as “The Scream.”
In Munch’s defense, the sunset can be a startling thing in Norway. Let the summer sun find a clearing on the horizon, and its raking orange rays empower the western side of everything-church spires, boat hulls, flower boxes, people’s faces-with a glow so intense the reflected energy is almost palpable. Who can say whether the sun has weakened itself in the exchange?
It’s still a custom in Norway, on Midsummer Night, for families and friends to gather ’round and light bonfires. Excuse for a late-night picnic. But in the days when folk wisdom held sway, the bonfires were lit in the belief that the flames would give the sun enough strength to “come back.” The mystical quality of those ancient rites resonates in Nikolai Astrup’s painting “Jonsokbal,” in which the height of the bonfire rivals that of nearby mountain tops. It recalls a time when the world needed elaborate protection not merely from runaway sunsets but witches and trolls as well, an imperative not so removed from Munch’s frightening experience, though he painted “The Scream” more than once in the intellectually progressive year of 1893.
If you know where to look, there are screams all over Oslo. “The Scream” that hangs downtown in the National Gallery’s Room 24 languishes in dull, dried-blood shades that belie Munch’s vivid description. “The Scream” at the Munch Museum, east of downtown in the Toyen neighborhood, is more psychedelic, more commercial, the version that gets reproduced in a proliferation of souvenirs, from mouse pads and key chains to jigsaw puzzles and inflatable dolls. At the corner of Pilestredet and St. Olavs Gate, only a lane or two north of the National Gallery, looms a black-and-white Scream three stories tall, painted by graffiti artists on the long-abandoned apartment building where Munch lived as a child.
And then there’s that screaming baby, the bronze sculpture that all of Oslo seems to have adopted as mascot. “The Little Hot-Head” stands on one foot and stamps the other, caught in mid-tantrum with fists clenched and face contorted. You can almost hear the naked brat’s high-pitched wail, so honestly did sculptor Gustav Vigeland render him, from earliest sketch in 1901 to finished piece in 1928-30. Yet the “Hot-Head” is just one of more than 150 of the artist’s humanistic works-and the only screamer-set among the thick forests and vast lawns of Oslo’s Vigeland Park.
The park was 30 years in the making and today is the kind of place where people spread blankets pell-mell across the grass; and giggling toddlers, very much flesh and blood, play peek-a-boo behind multicolored umbrellas. Their liveliness defies the park’s centerpiece: a monolith of the bodies of men, women and children carved in ghost-colored granite, a narrow funeral pyre of stone, rising to, but never quite reaching, the sky. There’s something in the asymmetrical curves of the monolith’s bodies that echoes the fancy scrollwork carved more than a thousand years ago into the boat prows, posts and sleds displayed a ferry-and-tram-ride away at the Viking Ship Museum on Oslo’s Bygdoy Peninsula. When the boats-there are three of them-outlived their seaworthiness, they became funeral ships and were buried along with their masters in blue-clay mounds south of the city.
The arabesque lines of the woodcarver’s art that in Viking times often culminated in a serpent’s or dragon’s head, snaked their way through the centuries and throughout the country to turn up in surprising places. The 700-year-old stave churches that still stand along the western fiords are an example. One of the churches, sprouting crosses and dragon heads from its eaves, has been reconstructed, next door to the Viking ships, at the Norwegian Folk Museum. The outdoor gallery of culture has amassed historic dwellings from all over the nation in a time-walk of whimsical wooden houses, many with the grassy sod roofs still found in the countryside.
One great lesson of the Norwegian Folk Museum, and of the Viking ships, for that matter, may be that the soul of Norway’s art lies in its details. Not in the old wooden houses, which except for their roofs are rather plain, but in a separate exhibit of household items like the graceful wooden stein from the late 1800s that’s tooled as finely as leather. Not in the hulls of the Viking ships, but in their elaborately carved prows and figureheads. And, back in Oslo proper, not in the brick-and-glass purity of the modern city, but in the patterns of the aging leather upholstery on certain chairs that sit in Akershus Fortress, which has guarded Oslo since 1299.
In summer, sundown is a long time in coming. The hours between the museums’ closings and sunset are best spent on the waterfront, in the parks or strolling Karl Johans Gate. The bustling street borders a narrow park of trees from its beginning at the Royal Palace to Parliament, several blocks down. Then, from there on, Karl Johans Gate devotes itself entirely to pedestrian traffic, shops and lively restaurants and bars with names like Salsa, Kilkinny Inn, TexMex and Woodstock.
Unless it’s overcast, the sun won’t have exhausted itself in setting; it’ll leave enough daylight behind to illuminate the city well past 11 p.m. Buskers appear, seemingly to replace the portrait artists who packed in their easels when the shops closed. There’s music and conversation in the air, and everyone’s dressed for a good time. In mood, it’s about as far as you can get from 1892 and Edvard Munch’s grim interpretation, “Evening on Karl Johan Street,” where Scream look-alikes march in a funeral procession of top hats. The difference lies in the art of happiness.
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Toni Stroud, staff Travel writer for the Chicago Tribune, traded brush and palette for pad and pencil a few years ago, and now makes pictures with words instead of paints.
