Famous Norwegian artist. Professional crazy person. This is a photo I took in a movie about Munch’s life they showed at the Munch museum. I don’t remember what part of the Munch’s life this may have been dealing with. We could be at the part when he purchased a revolver, shot himself in the hand and then went to the hospital and demanded to be anesthetized with cocaine to watch the bullet lodged in his hand get removed. Or, was it the part when he took his nude models (male and female) to the beach to paint? That for some reason really irritated his fellow beach goers. Or was this during his days of boozing and nervous breakdown in Copenhagen?

Needless to say, I love this man and his art. Who cannot love a man who makes these types of pictures with these sort of titles?:

Title:

Painting:

Title:

Now the Munch museum is not your everyday museum. In case you didn’t know, a couple of Munch’s paintings have been stolen, including the one I traveled oceans to see (more on that later) so this place was turned into a fortress:

Once you pass through these doors, you can’t go back out again. At the end of the exhibit, there was a door you went out of that was also secure. Not to mention, some of the paintings were behind these glass walls that could close whenever they wanted them to.

Closed:

Open:

And, some of them were behind some rather thick glass:

I guess the message was “don’t steal” or whatever, I don’t know. Finding out about Mr. Munch’s hilarious private life and seeing the fortress his work was kept in added to the fact that the man did produce some beautiful work:

And then there is the little matter of this thing:

I traveled all of those oceans to see this thing and it was of course being repaired after being stolen. Twice. I guess that’s why the rest of the paintings are kept in a kind of fortress like place. I walked the gallery, walked it again and no painting. I finally found out there was a version of it in the National Gallery, so I high tailed it over there, to see the painting and to find out that no photos of any kind were allowed there. That thing up there, in case you couldn’t tell, was a notebook cover from the Munch museum gift shop.

I kind of felt like the person in the Scream about not getting to see the actual Scream. The alternate version was nice, but the colors were muddy. Darn Norwegian thieves. Hasn’t Munch suffered enough already?