{"id":802837,"date":"2026-07-16T00:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T00:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/802837\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T00:00:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T00:00:09","slug":"edvard-munch-and-the-chocolate-factory-the-bitter-truth-behind-the-freia-frieze-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/802837\/","title":{"rendered":"Edvard Munch and the Chocolate Factory: the bitter truth behind the Freia frieze | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

At first, to be among Edvard Munch<\/a>\u2019s Freia frieze is almost to be swept up by a dance. Across the 12 canvases on display at Oslo\u2019s Munch museum, fruit pickers\u2019 arms reach with balletic poise, water flows from watering cans in unison, farewells are dramatically bid and synchronised couples move across a beach arm in arm. Even Munch\u2019s brushstrokes, dominated by blues and greens, cannot sit still.<\/p>\n

But as you start to ponder why these scenes \u2013 commissioned in 1922 as public art to decorate the walls of the women\u2019s canteen at the factory for renowned Norwegian chocolate company Freia \u2013 were created, the urge to move evaporates.<\/p>\n

Public art is often viewed in an almost noble light. How fantastic that the creator of the world-famous The Scream also wanted to make art for factory workers! But were the needs of the girls and women who worked in the chocolate factory \u2013 then often referred to as the \u201cchocolate girls\u201d \u2013 actually on the minds of their employer, or even Munch, when this was created?<\/p>\n

\u201cThose years when Munch was working on the Freia frieze were very dramatic and dark for the whole of Europe, especially after the first world war,\u201d says curator Ana Mar\u00eda Bresciani, who, through the exhibition \u2013 titled Edvard Munch<\/a> and the Chocolate Factory \u2013 uses the frieze to tell the wider story of workers\u2019 rights and the fight for gender equality. It also touches on the violent, exploitative and racist history of Freia\u2019s cacao sourcing \u2013 which came first from South America and the Caribbean, and later from Ghana, at the time a British colony \u2013 and its marketing.<\/p>\n

The exhibition marks the first time that the frieze \u2013 which is on loan to the museum until October while Freia\u2019s canteen undergoes renovations \u2013 has gone on display in Norway outside the factory, and only the second time it has left the factory at all (it was previously exhibited in 1968 at the National museum in Stockholm). The production of Freia\u2019s chocolate ( which claims to provide \u201ca little piece of Norway\u201d) is still largely based in Oslo, but the company is now owned by US food giant Mondel\u0113z International.<\/p>\n

The frieze first arrived at the factory in 1923 at a pivotal time for Norwegian workers rights. Around this time they won the right to an eight-hour day and summer holidays, but, says Bresciani, many of the girls and young women would not have had experience of the kinds of scenes Munch depicts. \u201cI don\u2019t think they had access to summer cottages, they probably didn\u2019t have access to swimming and they probably didn\u2019t have much access to art just yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four Girls in \u00c5sg\u00e5rdstrand (The Freia Frieze IX). Photograph: Halvor Bj\u00f8rng\u00e5rd\/Edvard Munch<\/p>\n

Munch appears not to care about any of this. In fact, perhaps, this was the point: to educate them. \u201cThe little chocolate girls, sat there eating, understanding the pictures better and better,\u201d he wrote, after a visit to see his paintings in situ.<\/p>\n

There were apparently complaints about the absence of doors and chimneys on the houses in the paintings, which Munch was asked back to the factory to add \u2013 but only agreed to do so on the proviso that a chauffeur waited for him outside the factory. When this didn\u2019t happen, writes author and journalist Marta Breen, he told the factory director to do it himself.<\/p>\n

Then there was the question of cost. Chocolate mogul Johan Throne Holst paid his friend 80,000 Norwegian kroner (the equivalent of about 2.5m Norwegian kroner or about \u00a3192,000 today) for the works, while the women survived on minuscule incomes.<\/p>\n

This gulf in income did not go unnoticed. \u201cWhile the workers are kept on starvation wages, large capital is invested in costly paintings, which in time could be sold at a large profit,\u201d reported Arbeiderbladet, an Oslo-based daily newspaper, on 15 October 1923, accompanied by a picture of the canteen, paintings hanging in the background.<\/p>\n

double quotation markHe thought his art was to be lived with among the people \u2013 and he was a strategist when it came to that<\/p>\n

Despite this, Freia wanted to be seen as a progressive employer and played an important role in the building of the nation state. Employees were granted one free bath a week, a monthly manicure (for hygiene as opposed to aesthetic reasons), access to modern flushing toilets, uniforms, a factory doctor and low-cost porridge and cacao milk (seen as preferable to copious poor-quality coffee).<\/p>\n

The Freia frieze is one of just two public works by Munch, the other being the Aula, a series of paintings for a hall in the University of Oslo. But the artist was very taken with the idea of public art. He had started working on plans \u2013 and had powerful support \u2013 to produce a public work for the new Oslo city hall. But he was never commissioned, and by the time it was completed he had died.<\/p>\n

While his focus on the worker could show that he was aware that times and the Norwegian capital were changing, Bresciani believes it was fame Munch sought and that he viewed public commissions \u2013 and his network of friends in high places \u2013 as a route to enabling that.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was really interested in public commissions,\u201d she says. \u201cBecause he thought his art was to be lived with among the people \u2013 and he was a strategist when it came to that.\u201d From early in his career he was putting on exhibitions, charging for entrance and selling his work, she adds. \u201cHe knew that he wanted to be known and he wanted to be out there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At first, to be among Edvard Munch\u2019s Freia frieze is almost to be swept up by a dance.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":802838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-802837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/802838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}