Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter of The Scream, died in his sleep on January 23, 1944, aged 80, at Ekely, his estate on the edge of Oslo. His last illness began as a cold, caught the day after an explosion shook the city five weeks earlier. Norway had been under German occupation since 1940.
The explosion came on December 19, 1943, one week after his 80th birthday. Ammunition stored at Filipstad, in Oslo's harbor, caught fire and blew up, damaging part of Munch's house.
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Munch had bought Ekely, a house and its grounds, in 1916. Through the war years he stayed behind its walls, refusing all contact with the Germans.
That night the blast woke him, and he watched the fire light up the sky over the harbor. Afterward he painted the scene in a watercolor. The next day he had a cold.
A winter cold and no named disease
Munch never fully recovered. He was 80, and almost all the art he had kept over his life sat around him at Ekely, much of it on the upper floor of the house. Four years earlier, a new will had already decided where it would go.
What You'll Discover
What he feared the Germans would take.
Why he rewrote his will.
What Oslo found at Ekely.
What his last self portrait shows.