Edvard Munch’s Paintings for a Chocolate Factory Get a Rare Museum Outing

One of only two public commissions Edvard Munch ever completed is marred by nicotine and chocolate. For the past century, his 12 monumental paintings depicting bucolic life have hung in the workers’ canteen of an Oslo-based chocolate factory, long subject to the drift of cacao dust and cigarette smoke, which was only banned from the Norwegian workplace in the mid-1990s.

For the first time in their history, the paintings of prim and proper children and dancing couples are departing the Freia chocolate factory, but they’re not traveling far. Just a couple of miles down the road is the Munch Museum, which is presenting the so-called Freia Frieze while the canteen is refurbished. The paintings are being shown alongside their preparatory sketches in an exhibition examining the artist’s 1920s output, a period that saw stirring social change in Norway. In the meantime, Freia employees will have to make-do with replica Munchs as they enjoy lunch.

The paintings were commissioned by Johan Throne Holst in 1922 for the women’s canteen of his central Oslo factory. He paid Munch the equivalent of 2.5 million Norwegian kroner (roughly $250,000) and left an option open for the artist to paint a companion series in the men’s canteen, though these were never realized.

In 1934, the paintings were moved to a new, larger all-gender canteen in a ceremony presided over by an orchestra. Originally completed in the span of two months, the Freia Frieze depicts summer life in a Norwegian coastal town with Munch presenting scenes of work and play in loose and rapid brushstrokes. It’s a quotidian type of utopia: workers strain to gather fruit, fishermen amble towards boats, and people idle pensively by the shoreline in canvases washed over by the pale blue light of endless summer days.

By the standards of the early 20th century, Holst was a relatively enlightened industrialist, providing the factory with a doctor, emphasizing worker hygiene (uniforms could be washed onsite), and instituting a 48-hour work week. As the paintings show, Holst’s concerns extended to aesthetics with a contemporary art critic noting that seeing as only the best was good enough for his workers, there was little choice but to commission the nation’s greatest painter.

Munch, too, was in on the ideals of the project. In the early 1900s, his focus had moved from idealized and symbolic depictions of emotion to works grounded in individuals, with a particular emphasis paid to the worker. “This transformation to public ethics emphasized the dignity and everyday reality of labour,” the show’s curator Ana María Bresciani said over email. “In developing his peasant motifs, Munch recognized that these subjects served as new and potent national symbols.”

The scale of the canteen paintings followed Munch’s sense that small paintings (with their large frames) were the purview of bourgeois art. “Now it is the time of the worker,” Munch wrote at the time. “I wonder whether art will again belong to everyone? Will it resume its rightful place on the spacious walls of public buildings?” At Freia, he attempted to answer those questions. As the preliminary sketches for the unrealized second series show, Munch planned to argue the proletariat’s case more overtly: at the center of the first major painting, he presents a worker with a clenched fist.

Freia was at the frontline of shaping Norwegian labor standards with the exhibition showing advertising and informational films produced by the company in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the concerns was the importance of unions and the demands from workers for eight-hour days and annual leave. It was a struggle Munch identified with saying at the time that “as long as I have worked in this country I have fought for my art with a clenched fist.”