Where to See Edvard Munch: Starry Night, Summer Storms and Uneasy Portraits

The weather had already broken when Munch began The Storm. His friend Jens Thiis recalled that he started it the day after a violent summer storm at Åsgårdstrand. The painting does not give us a report on damaged buildings. A woman in white stands apart from other women, with her hands to her head. Behind them, the windows of a house are lit. Shelter is close, yet nobody seems to have reached it.

Åsgårdstrand supplies several stops in this journey, although the paintings themselves have travelled far from Norway. A shoreline goes to Los Angeles, a garden wall to Paris, girls on a landing stage to Hamburg. The portraits lead into another history, of people who sat for Munch and supported his work. These are encounters worth arranging in their own right, without treating every canvas as a footnote to The Scream.

Los Angeles: the figures have become a shadow

The Getty’s Starry Night shows Åsgårdstrand in 1893, the same year as The Storm. A pale fence runs diagonally across the foreground; the shape upon it may be the shadow of two lovers. The trees become a rounded mass rather than a collection of separate branches. Munch left some areas of the sky bare while building others with thicker paint. On our autumn 2026 check, the canvas was in the Getty’s West Pavilion, gallery W205.

The nearly square canvas resists the familiar sweep of a seaside panorama. Its fence obstructs the foreground, and the shoreline bends away. What first looks like an empty landscape begins to feel occupied. The possible lovers never become people we can identify; they remain a disturbance on a surface. Give that uncertainty a little time before moving on. A picture does not need a visible face to make looking feel intrusive.

New York: a purchase after decades of waiting

MoMA’s acquisition of The Storm in 1974 ended a search that its curator William Rubin described as having lasted decades. The museum presented the purchase the following spring. That history is a useful correction to the idea that museum collections simply accumulate the obvious names: finding an available painting of the desired period could take years. On our autumn 2026 check, this one was not on view.

The women’s shared gesture does not bring them together. The central figure is isolated from the group, while the illuminated house suggests an ordinary life continuing nearby. MoMA’s discussion reads the storm as psychological as well as meteorological. Nothing requires us to assign a particular diagnosis to anyone in the scene. The gap between one woman and the others is already enough to make the picture difficult to leave behind.

Paris and Hamburg: the same town, different distances

In 1904 Munch sent Trees and Garden Wall in Åsgårdstrand to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Now in the Musée d’Orsay collection, it is also known as Summer Night at Åsgårdstrand. No figures interrupt the diagonal that drives into the scene. Repeated visits to a familiar place had given him material he could reorganise. The wall and trees need no incident to turn a summer resort into an uneasy space.

Hamburg’s The Girls on the Bridge puts people back into that landscape. The site is a ferry landing at Åsgårdstrand; Munch bought a fisherman’s house in the town in 1898. One girl turns towards us, holding her straw hat, while her companions look away. The railing draws them into a shared line without making their thoughts accessible. Standing shoulder to shoulder seems to have done little to reduce their distance from one another.

Hamburg’s Munch collection has its own interrupted history. Before the Nazi campaign against so-called degenerate art in 1937, the Kunsthalle held two paintings and numerous prints. After the war, director Carl-Georg Heise rebuilt the collection during his tenure from 1945 to 1955. The paintings discussed here in Hamburg and Paris have no confirmed display location in our supplied records, so check the individual titles before planning around them.

Amsterdam and Zurich: the people behind the paintings

Felix Auerbach sat for Munch in his own home in 1906. The physicist’s portrait was completed in a single sitting; the red background contains layers so diluted that paint ran down the canvas. The Van Gogh Museum acquired it in 2017, bringing Munch’s use of colour into a collection built around another painter’s experiments. Speed here does not mean a thin or tentative picture. The running paint leaves the making visible behind a man who seems entirely composed.

Portrait of Elsa Glaser, in the Kunsthaus Zürich collection, was painted in 1913. Elsa translated French literature; her husband Curt collected Munch. Nazi persecution forced Curt into exile in 1933. His paintings were stored at the Kunsthaus from 1935, and war prevented their shipment to America in 1941. After his death, his second wife Maria sold this portrait to the museum in 1946. The journey of a seated woman’s likeness runs through displacement, storage and a journey that never happened.

Frankfurt: jealousy outlives the quarrel

The Städel’s Jealousy brings two male faces around a woman. One resembles the writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, the other Munch. By 1913, the earlier rivalry surrounding Dagny Juel, who married Przybyszewski, lay far in the past. The later picture may also carry memories of Munch’s troubled relationship with Tulla Larsen. It compresses experiences rather than recording a single reliable scene; identifying a face cannot settle everything happening around it.

Getty gallery W205 provides a confirmed starting point in these records; recheck the hanging before travelling. For a European journey, pick the portrait or seaside scene that interests you most and ask its museum about that exact painting. Keep the unavailable New York canvas off a tightly timed itinerary until its return is confirmed.