Edvard Munch government. Munch was 76 years old. With nearly an entire collection of his art in the second floor of his house, Munch lived in fear of a Nazi confiscation. Seventy-one of the paintings previously taken by the Nazis had been returned to Norway through purchase by collectors (the other eleven were never recovered), including "The Scream" and "The Sick Child", and they too were hidden from the Nazis. Munch died in his house at Ekely near Oslo on 23 January 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday. His Nazi-orchestrated funeral suggested to Norwegians that he was a Nazi sympathizer,
Rolf Stenersen of his art collection, which centered around works by Munch and Ludvig Karsten. He wrote essays on artists such as Edvard Munch, Erik Harry Johannessen, Jakob Weidemann and Paul Klee. He published books on economy, including "Penger og tall" from 1937. His début as a fiction writer was the short story collection "Godnatt da du" from 1931. He donated his collection of Norwegian art to the municipality of Aker in 1936. From 1994 the collection has been on display in the Stenersen Museum in Oslo. His books were forbidden by the Nazi regime in 1941, and Stenersen had to flee