In Oslo, a must-visit is the Munch Museum. There you’ll learn about Expressionist artist Edvard Munch, who was born on December 12 in 1863. Below is a piece I wrote for the International Herald Tribune some time ago.

Painter Edvard Munch in his home, about 1943

Oslo’s Munch Museum

OSLO — When the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch didn’t know what to do with a painting in progress, he occasionally hung it outside — in the rain. “A very dangerous thing to do,” the curator of Oslo’s Munch Museum, Alf Bøe, said disapprovingly. “It ruins the colors’ adhesiveness to the canvas.” Yet Munch, one of the leading figures of Expressionism, believed that “horse cures,” as he called his water treatments, improved the colors by making them look less new.

Munch’s collection of paintings, prints and drawings is indoors now, and the Munch Museet, as it’s known, takes very seriously its responsibility as guardian of the artists’s legacy to the city of Oslo, not only in in displaying his work but on educating the public about the painter, who died in 1944.

On the basis of quantity alone, the one-man museum is remarkable. From about 1906 on, Munch tended to keep his works, Bøe said. “From that time on, this collection is very representative. Earlier than that date, we have replicas of all of his sketches and drawings — his forethoughts and afterthoughts in art.” Bøe said the museum mounts a fairly complete sequence of Munch’s major ideas and…