contexploration

The resurfacing of the paintings is connected to another crime. The central figure behind the commando-style robbery of a NOKAS cash service centre in Stavanger is due to meet in court on Monday for his appeal case. In March 2004, a team of a dozen ski-masked robbers got away with nearly 70 million kroner (€ 7 million/$ 8.5 million) from NOKAS, shooting one police officer to death. The leader of the pack later ordered friends in Oslo’s criminal underground to carry out the theft of the Munch paintings while being on the run from the police. His plan was to divert resources from the police hunt by stealing two icons of Norwegian culture. This operation would also ensure his possession of a wild card to reduce his sentence when he got caught. He was arrested in an Internet café in Malaga, Spain, in March 2005.

Today Norwegian newspapers claim that the NOKAS-plotter has been secretly negotiating with the police while in jail in Stavanger. In exchange for revealing where the paintings were hidden, he is to receive lighter jail term conditions – most prominently he has demanded frequent visits from his girlfriend. Yesterday, police were notified of the paintings’ whereabouts, just a few days before the start of his appeal case. Norwegians are horrified by the deal. The symbolic gesture of getting the Munch paintings returned has overshadowed the brutal character of the robbery in Stavanger.

The criminal network behind the NOKAS robbery is well organized. It operates internationally with ease and their members are obviously capable of performing complex operations. They could have done well in business. They could have done great things for their societies. Instead, these young men have chosen to run around inspired by Italian-American mobsters, stealing, killing police officers and exploiting the Norwegian cultural elite’s emotional attachment to Edvard Munch – and Munch's global popularity. I would rather have both the NOKAS-plotter and the paintings out of sight forever, instead of such an embarrassing capitulation to a blackmail scheme designed by a man responsible for the death of a policeman.

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This is what I wrote about the Munch heist back in April 2006:

The Norwegian underworld has an obsession with Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Not only because his art works are expensive and incredibly easy to snatch from low security art institutions, but also because certain key figures in the criminal circuit have a personal dedication to the artist. Some of them have studied Munch and his art for years. This gives their undertakings a certain mythological flare. Recently, the Madonna and a version of The Scream were stolen from the Munch Museum in broad daylight. Two armed men broke into the museum and ran away with the paintings. A theory that has been put forward in the media is that the two men acted on orders from another criminal, the man behind the March 2004 NOKAS break-in: The commando-style robbery of a NOKAS cash service center in Stavanger resulted in a dozen men getting away with nearly 70 million kroner (€ 7 million/$ 8.5 million), leaving one police officer dead. The Norwegian police speculates that the man behind the planning of the robbery later might have paid for the theft of the two Munch paintings to divert resources from the police hunt and secure possession of a wild card to reduce his sentence if he ever got caught, which he eventually was. But today the paintings are still missing, and the NOKAS men are all in prison.

A few days ago I visited the Munch Museum in my lunch break to take a peek at Life Force, the current exhibition with early twentieth century artworks by Edvard Munch and other Scandinavian artists. The museum itself is a dreary white building in one of the most anonymous areas of Oslo. The outrage caused by the latest armed robbery has resulted in an airport-like security system at the front doors, complete with scanners, one-way doors, cameras everywhere and a security staff preoccupied with treating Japanese tourists like potential kleptomaniacs. Inside the museum itself, the roof is low, the halls are made up like labyrinths, all this creating a claustrophobic feel. There are not enough lights, you can hardly appreciate the rich colours of Munch’s expressionist style. In the permanent collection I noticed that one of the neon light rods above the painting The Voice was out of use. I contacted one of the museum’s guards and made him aware of this. He said: “Don’t you know that Munch often painted on cardboards and other light-sensitive materials?” I told him “yes”, but that The Voice certainly was not one of these. (It’s a seductive painting - on a regular canvas - of a woman in white in the woods by the sea.) I suggested that he changed the light rod. The guard called up the head of the museum on his intercom, and after a ten minute heated conversation, he reluctantly confided to me that he had to change the rod.

This episode says a lot about the state of affairs at the Munch Musem. The museum leadership is neither on good terms with local politicians, the Munch family nor the public itself. To visit the place is like stepping inside Hitler’s bunker. You feel like getting the hell out of there as soon as possible. But maybe this horrific presentation of Munch’s art is a symptomatic of how Norwegians feel about the artist in general? Like the other two Norwegian cultural icons - Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun - Munch explored the realms of melancholy and despair. To be Norwegian is to always be associated with these inhibiting emotions. (In contrast, the Swedes are charming, easy going and friendly. One suspects that the Swedes have somehow managed to institute the world’s smoothest puberty as part of their national culture.) Norwegians are constantly wrestling with trying to get oneself out of oneself – which includes getting out of ones Norwegianness. Nobody wants to flaunt their insecurity.

But every once in a while, maybe on a night out on the town, I meet foreigners that have moved to Oslo partly because of a fascination with Munch, Hamsun or Ibsen. Incredibly, these neurotic artists have been able to attract people from Argentine, Manhattan, Tokyo and Rome. These nomads have seen something magical and raw in a novel by Hamsun, or sensed a psychological honesty in Munch. Some have moved to Norway to study Norwegian so that they could read Hamsun in his original language - others are curious of the nature and atmosphere of Oslo, the city that inspired so many of Munch’s paintings. They fall in love, find a partner. A few of them settle for life. One Australian friend told me: “In part, the traumas of Hamsun and Munch are still present in the Norwegian psyche. I find that if you just scratch the surface of a Norwegian you will discover an insecure person on the brink of a nervous breakdown. This is an extraordinary national trait. For example, the drinking tradition manifested in ‘helgefylla’ throws half the population through the looking glass every weekend. People’s personalities are practically inverted and they ramble through the city streets like in some kind of surrealistic parallel universe. You guys are all borderline – I love it! Ha ha ha!”

[. . .]

Edvard Munch always seems to come back to haunt us. Waking up one morning, late for work, getting dressed in a hurry, running down the stairs, turning the corner of the block half asleep, and suddenly there you have it, right in front of you: A red and orange sunrise completely illuminating the heavens over Oslo. For a second you just have to gasp and ask yourself: Is this the apocalypse? Then The Scream comes to mind, and what Munch himself wrote about it: “I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. I stopped and leaned against the railing deadly tired – looking out across flaming clouds that hung like blood and sword over the deep blue fjord and town. My friends walked on. I stood there trembling with anxiety and I felt a great, infinite scream through nature.”

It’s impossible to live here and not feel the same, occasionally. Even though one attempts to repress Munch and his art by trying to convince oneself that one has overcome the distressing emotions that he projected through his art, or by hiding his art in a bunker in the most godforsaken part of Oslo, the universality of his paintings continue to connect to the unconsciousness of humanity, making Munch a global superstar, which again makes it a matter of national importance to secure his works of art and to make him the poster child of Norwegian culture. The paintings left behind by the Master Communicator of Terror and Anxiety is protected by anti-terror measures. Young pilgrims of doom continue to flock to the land of the nervous Norwegians, populating our bars, pointing fingers at us, mocking us as we wander through the streets forlorn and paralyzed by perpetual puberty, clutching our notebooks.

LINKS: Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul is at MoMA, NY, February 19–May 8, 2006. Read a review from the New Yorker. See the Munch Museum for details on future exhibitions. Read the LA Times’ account of the heist trial in Oslo. Read about the bust theft from Vår Frelsers Gravlund. For a sense of Munch’s paranoia, check out Munch: By Himself. Some paintings: The Voice, The Yellow Log, Starry Night, Between the Clock and the Bed. Also, see a gallery from The Washington Post.