Edvard Munch and the Chocolate Factory

Commissioning Norway’s Most Famous Artist

In 1922, Johan Throne Holst, head of the Freia company, commissioned Edvard Munch to create 12 paintings in commemoration of the company’s 25th anniversary. At a time when two-thirds of Freia workers were women, the paintings first hung in the women’s canteen, but later, the company moved them to a common employee space. Munch earned 80,000 kroner for the project, the equivalent of around 2.6 million kroner or 250,000 US dollars today.

Edvard Munch was well-established as an important, groundbreaking artist at the time he received the Freia commission. 20 years earlier, he’d exhibited his Frieze of Life in Berlin, an ambitious series of paintings portraying the uncertainty and anguish for which he is most famous today. The Scream, of course, is the most famous of these paintings.

In 1916, Munch completed a series of 11 paintings for the University of Oslo, including The Sun, perhaps his most vibrant and hopeful work. The painting is 780 cm (nearly 26 ft.) long, and while the original still hangs at the University, a draft version of the painting proved so large that it had to be transported by barge and hoisted by crane through a side wall to its current place in MUNCH.

Munch was also contemplating the role of his artwork in the greater public consciousness around that time. Just six years after the unveiling of the Freia Frieze, Munch wrote, “I wonder if small-scale paintings will soon be pushed aside. With their large frames, they are merely a bourgeois art form designed for sitting rooms. It is an art dealer’s art, a product of the French Revolution, that gained strength after the victory of the bourgeoisie. Now it is the time of the workers. Do you not suppose that art should again become the property of everyone, and resume its rightful place on the spacious walls of public buildings?”

The Backdrop of Revolution

In the 1920s, Europe reeled in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and Norway was experiencing its own unrest among the working class. In the summer of 1921, an estimated 120,000 Norwegian workers went on strike in protest of a pay reduction for seamen. The Freia Frieze painting Farewell shows a woman holding a child and waving to a boat, perhaps an homage to these same seamen.

As Norwegian laborers were fighting to take back power, the Freia chocolate factory took strides to treat its labor force well. The company supported a 48-hour work week, provided an on-site doctor, and included a park on the factory grounds. Also, with the Munch commission, an employee lunch room would house paintings by the nation’s most famous artist.

This lavish commission invited criticism, however. According to a MUNCH publication, shortly after the unveiling of the Freia Frieze, a pro-labor newspaper published an article reading, “While workers are paid starvation wages, large sums of money are invested in expensive paintings which can be sold at a considerable profit over time.”

The Freia Frieze

In several of the Freia paintings, women and children are prominent subjects. Women pick fruit in Harvesting the Tree and in Girls Harvesting Fruit, and care for gardens in Girls Watering Flowers. Children head off for adventure in The Fairytale Forest. Often, the shoreline looms in the background, a reflection of the nation’s geography, and the constant backdrop for scenes of common people in daily life.

The Freia Frieze bears some resemblance to Munch’s Frieze of Life, both in the creation of a narrative arc and in the repetition of themes and iconography. For instance, the 7th painting in the Freia Frieze, Dance on the Beach, is similar to his Dance on the Beach from the 1900 Frieze of Life as well as his Dance on the Beach from a 1904 Linde Frieze. Youths on the Beach, the 12th panel, bears a resemblance to Melancholy, painted in 1894 and included in the Frieze of Life.

MUNCH publications point to the artist’s “…fascination with workers, women and children,” in several works. This includes sketches for more paintings at the Freia factory, which never came to be. MUNCH also owns Workers on the Building Site, an enormous 570 cm (nearly 18 ft.) long unfinished painting at one time destined for Oslo’s city hall. Munch often painted outside, and this work-in-progress was discovered balled up in ice and snow at the artist’s property after he died in 1944.

The Freia Frieze has long been a point of pride for the Norwegian chocolate company. The paintings are a stop on the Freia factory tour, and at one point, several of the paintings made their way onto chocolate bar wrappers.

The temporary relocation of the Freia Frieze paintings and the exhibit at MUNCH is supported by the Mondelez/Freia company, the Norwegian Labour Movement Archives and Library, the National Library of Norway, and the National Archives of Norway.

Edvard Munch and the Chocolate Factory is on view at the Munch Museum (MUNCH), Oslo, Norway, until October 11, 2026.