At the MUNCH in Oslo

It is pitch-black in the gallery. Pausing at the entrance to adjust to the darkness, I see a wary young man, vulnerable and intense: one of Edvard Munch’s many self-portraits, this one from 1891–1892. Inside, twelve more paintings and prints gradually materialize on two walls. The fourth wall of the gallery is occupied by a long bench, where I ultimately rest, numbed by the darkness (or the jet lag) and the gallery’s moody soundscape. Filling the room is music from Norway’s famous black-metal band Satyricon. The fifty-six-minute original composition plays on a continuous loop. Satyricon may not be the kind of gents you’d want to bring home to your parents, but their music makes a fitting descant for Munch’s themes of love, fear, pain, and death. As an immersive experience of the kind so much in demand these days, this is one of the more successful. It works because it is relatively simple, eliciting a direct, emotional connection with the art, one that isn’t mediated by tricked-up technology. It works, like so much in Oslo’s new munch Museum, because its focus is on the art—presentation, preservation, interpretation—of one of modernism’s most challenging figures.