Munch Museum for the 50th anniversary of Munch's death. This site has also been the location of filming for an "Olsenbanden"-movie from 1984. On Sunday, 22 August 2004, two paintings by Munch, "The Scream" and "Madonna", were stolen from the Munch Museum by masked men wielding firearms. The robbers forced the museum guards to lie down on the floor while they snapped the cable securing the paintings to the wall and escaped in a black Audi A6 station wagon, which police later found abandoned. The paintings were recovered by Oslo Police on 31 August 2006. In 2008, the City of Oslo promoted
Edvard Munch a medium to create graphic versions of his works. In 1896 he created his first woodcuts—a medium that proved ideal to Munch's symbolic imagery. Together with his contemporary Nikolai Astrup, Munch is considered an innovator of the woodcut medium in Norway. In December 1889 his father died, leaving Munch's family destitute. He returned home and arranged a large loan from a wealthy Norwegian collector when wealthy relatives failed to help, and assumed financial responsibility for his family from then on. Christian's death depressed him and he was plagued by suicidal thoughts: "I live with the dead—my mother, my sister, my