It’s enough to set off new screams: The City of Oslo’s popular but problematic museum devoted to Norwegian artist Edvard Munch has undergone budget cuts, layoffs and the loss of its director in the past few months. Now it faces expensive renovations just five years after opening, to replace faulty pipes in its ventilation system and repair a leaky roof.
Part of the problem is tied to the museum’s popularity itself, claim some experts. While the old Munch Museum attracted around 100,000 visitors in a good year, the new museum (dubbed simply MUNCH by its marketing staff) was dimensioned to accommodate around 500,000. It took in 1.7 million visitors in its first year and they’ve kept coming.
“That means the ventilation system has been operating at maximum, to keep air quality good,” Nils Erik Forsén, an engineer and former professor at Oslo’s Architecture- and Design College, told newspaper Klassekampen after it broke the latest bad news around the museum. Forsén himself was involved in construction of the new museum, which took six years to build on Oslo’s eastern waterfront.
He, like others, have noted that it’s not unusual for new buildings to have flaws and technical challenges. It was difficult to predict the public demands placed on MUNCH, though, or on how new environmentally-friendly roofing techniques would function in practice.
Not well, as it’s turned out, after dampness and water has been found in the flat roof covered with vegetation that’s over the museum’s first three floors. Haakon Berg Jensen, senior adviser at the City of Oslo’s building division, confirmed to Klassekampen that roof leaks have been detected in a third of the 3,000-square-meter roof.
The flat-roof design over the lower portion of the museum was a result, said Jensen, of “esthetics, climate measures” and a goal of letting rain water slowly sink into greenery atop the building, slowing its rush into the city’s sewer system. The costs of repairing the roof remain unclear, while it’s expected to cost NOK 10 million to replace all the “wrong” cooling pipes in the building this autumn.
The 13-story Munch museum, owned by the City of Oslo, opened in October 2021 and cost nearly NOK 3 billion to build. Despite its success in attracting far more visitors than even expected, and many corporate sponsors, it still poses a financial challenge to the city.
That emerged again earlier this year, when the museum’s management announced that it needed to cut 20 full-time positions and cut back on the museum’s research efforts. Newspaper Morgenbladet reported that the museum’s director Tone Hansen had to cut NOK 14.8 million from the museum’s budget and 10 percent of its staff.
That was not popular, and set off calls for the city to turn ownership over to a foundation instead of the museum being directly subjected to the whims of politicians. Hansen didn’t want to get involved in the ownership issue, but did state that she wasn’t worried about political “over-steering” while noting that many museums around the world are publicly owned.
Then came news in June that Hansen herself was leaving MUNCH to take over as leader of the Moderna Museum in Stockholm. Her departure came after four years at MUNCH and two years before her contract ran out, but she insisted she wasn’t leaving because of the budget challenges at MUNCH. Rather, she said, she “loved” MUNCH but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to lead Moderna even at slightly lower pay (SEK 1.5 million a year). Newspaper Dagsavisen reported, however, that in addition comes a paid apartment in Stockholm, use of a car and compensation for travel “home” to Oslo.
Now the search is on for her replacement, with the deadline for applications last Thursday. Hansen has already started at Moderna, so her post is being filled temporarily by a museum adminstrator, Henrik Svalheim.
Hansen told Morgenbladet recently that she thought the budget-cutting process was tough for everyone at MUNCH, but claimed she was leaving a “tidy museum where cutbacks and reorganization has been completed.” There’s still been some griping, however, also among the public after the price of admission tickets to the museum jumped by 27 percent in high season to NOK 280 (USD 28) this summer, with no discounts for seniors. One retiree complained in the media recently that since Edvard Munch himself had turned over all the art in his own collection to the city for free, it should be on public display for free, too.
It never has been, though, and given the costs looming ahead for the musuem and the city, free entry is unlikely. Now the city also needs to hire a new director. There were plenty of candidates for Hansen’s job last summer, when speculation flew over who would replace her, but now they’ll also face the major job of repairing and renovating the building itself.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
