A Cosmopolitan Boom Town

Oslo is home to 700,000 people but punches above its weight. It's smaller than Stockholm, but feels much bigger. Where Stockholm is cleaner, Oslo is more urban, grittier. Stockholm is vibrant, Oslo is busy. The people of Stockholm are caucasian, Oslo is more diverse. Over the past several years, its population has been rapidly increasing. Immigrants from the Middle East and Central Europe flock to Norway's biggest city for jobs, quality of life and higher pay, and the city is booming! Oslo has the feel of a practical, hard-working city. Stockholm seems something like Disney World. Neither is bad, just different.

Later we visited the city's renovated harbor area, a beautiful job of transforming the old, gritty harbor into new apartments, restaurants, offices and the impressive Munch Museet (Museum) based on the work of artist Edvard Munch who created one of the world’s most famous paintings: The Scream.

Edvard Munch and The Scream

Munch drew and painted several versions of the scream and the museum rotates the originals while also allowing you to see digital versions. Some are in color some in black and white. We saw the black and white version up close and personal.

The origin of the image supposedly emerged from a panic attack that Munch suffered in 1892. The images artistically recounted the trauma he felt. He called the works Despair. He said the episode occurred as he was strolling along a path outside Kristiania (now Oslo): “The sun was setting and the clouds turned as red as blood. I sensed a scream passing through nature. I felt as though I could actually hear the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds like real blood. The colors shrieked.”

There’s a connection to the “screams” and images created by ancient mummies we saw in Peru. One of the mummies is now located at La Specola, Florence. In 1978, the Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested that the strange, skeletal creature in the foreground of the painting was inspired by this mummy (see image below), which Munch could have seen at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was buried in a fetal position with its hands alongside its face, common in human sacrifices performed in Peru. Artist Paul Gauguin saw the mummy and it stood as a model for figures in more than twenty of Gauguin's paintings. In 2004, an Italian anthropologist speculated that Munch might have seen a mummy in Florence's Museum of Natural History, which bears an even more striking resemblance to the painting.

However, later studies have disputed the Italian theory, as Munch did not visit Florence until after painting The Scream. Still, look at the two images. It makes you wonder if somewhere Munch hadn’t seen it or something similar and the image resided in his subconscious until that evening in 1892.

Oslo Recommendations

If you’re heading to Oslo, consider one of these excellent recommendations. Fore more, please see all of our Norwegian Recommendations.