Norway: The agony and the ecstasy

"I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a great sadness. Suddenly the sky became blood red. I stopped, leaned against the railings, dead tired. And saw the flaming clouds as blood over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there trembling with angst. And I sensed a loud, unending scream pierce nature." These words, written shortly after his walk, led to his painting The Scream. They contain some of the sense of inner anguish conveyed by the lone figure standing beneath a turbulent sunset; his eyes and mouth wide open, his hands clamped to bulging temples.

No painting sums up the alienation and isolation of modern life like The Scream by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. After the Mona Lisa, it is one of the most recognised paintings in the world. The idea came to Munch while he was walking in the wooded hills above Oslo more than a century ago, following a bout of heavy drinking. "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a great sadness. Suddenly the sky became blood red. I stopped, leaned against the railings, dead tired. And saw the flaming clouds as blood over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there trembling with angst. And I sensed a loud, unending scream pierce nature." These words, written shortly after his walk, led to his painting The Scream. They contain some of the sense of inner anguish conveyed by the lone figure standing beneath a turbulent sunset; his eyes and mouth wide open, his hands clamped to bulging temples.

On a fine morning, and with a clear head, I set out to retrace Munch's steps.

The number 19 tram trundles eastwards through the city centre and up into the woods that form Ekeberg Park, a popular spot for Sunday strollers. Munch lived nearby for a time and often walked around here. If you alight at Sjomannsskolen, there are no signposts indicating the artistic importance of the site. But cross the road and enter the grounds to a business training centre that used to be the former Seaman's School, and you will stumble across a fine view of the city and fjord. Coincidentally, some of the oldest known examples of art in Norway lie carved into a granite rock to the left of the entrance. You can only just discern the worn outlines of deer and elk picked out in red; still, they have been left out in the wet for 6,000 years.

Armed with a copy of the picture, you can try to work out where Munch must have paused that day. A small path below the school leads down a grassy slope to a rail reminiscent of the one in the painting. But there is another, further down, closer to the shore of the Oslo Fjord. The rutted track the artist shows is now a busy road leading to Sweden.

The several versions of The Scream were not, of course, intended to be exact depictions of reality, but to represent his tortured state of mind. He made a point of painting from memory. However, on a fine morning it is difficult to feel the terrible angst that seized him. Oslo lies spread out beneath you like a map. Near the top of the opposite hills stands the scimitar shape of Holmenkollen, the ski jump built for the 1952 Winter Olympics. Hugging the far side of the fjord, two steeply pitched roofs stand out. These are the museums housing the Kon-Tiki and Nansen's polar ship Fram – each a venerable reminder that Norway scores higher on heroic maritime history than it does for fine art (or Eurovision Song Contests).

Beneath you, on the right, at the fjord's apex, stands a large redbrick box building, with twin square towers. Radhus, the City Hall, was completed just before the Second World War. It was an unfulfilled ambition of Munch's to paint a frieze inside. On the peninsula jutting out in the foreground of Radhus stands Akerhus fortress, built to defend the city. In 1864, the year following Edvard's birth, his father, Dr Christian Munch, took up the post of army corps physician there.

Walk back out of the school grounds, across the tram tracks and into Ekeberg Park. Following the signpost through the woods marked Jernalderstien, take the first path left leading down towards the city. At a fork marked by two log benches, turn left again. The winding path gets steeper here and is quite rough in places. It brings you out at Oslo Gate, on the edge of the old town.

Oslo Gate leads into Gronlandsleiret. Not so long ago this area was completely run down. However, an influx of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East in the Seventies and Eighties brought about a transformation. Their influence and industry has helped to regenerate the locality. They opened new businesses and brought fresh life to the area. And when the potential of its elegant and spacious 19th-century flats was rediscovered in the 1990s, things changed even further. Now the area is home to a broad mix of society with ethnic shops, and restaurants brushing shoulders with fashionable bars and design studios.

Through Gronland is Vaterland Bridge. It is a long time since Lilletorvet, the market that Munch drew in 1881, disappeared. Yet the empty spaces beneath the flyover cry out for it to be brought back. Make your way towards a towering glass and steel hotel, past the stark concrete structures that blot this part of the city. After this alienating urban wasteland, you reach the front of Central Station, at the beginning of Karl Johan's Gate, Oslo's most famous thoroughfare. Named after an 18th-century king, it was home to Norway's thriving artistic community in Munch's day.

As well as featuring in many of Munch's works, the street played a central role in his life. A little way up, turn left into Nedre Slottsgata. Opposite Steen & Strom department store is number 9. This was the Munch family's first address in Oslo. The original wooden house has long since been torn down.

To understand how a painting as harrowing as The Scream was conceived, you need to step back in time. Looking at present-day Oslo with its clean streets and affluent citizens it is almost impossible to imagine Munch's childhood. The rising prosperity of the 1870s, which had attracted people from all over the country, gave way to economic decline. Life was grim for nearly all save the very rich. Shanty towns had sprung up on the city outskirts. Without proper running water and sewers they became breeding grounds for tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and whooping cough. Munch's father, a devout Christian, treated many victims for free. But death was commonplace. As a child, Munch suffered from TB. Both his mother and a sister died of it. He painted pictures relating to their deaths throughout his life.

Back on Karl Johan's Gate, continue west. Just before the street breaks out into an elegant tree-lined boulevard is a small square, Stortings Plass. From 1882, Munch and some friends rented a studio there. The seated statue is of Christian Krogh, one of Norway's best known 19th-century painters. Munch was his pupil for a time. As the most powerful of the artist's earliest champions, Krogh bought one of his paintings to demonstrate his support. Next door is Tostrups, home to the former goldsmiths. In 1892 Munch held a major exhibition on the premises after his return from France, where he had studied the work of the Impressionists.

A little further along on the left-hand side, facing the distant palace, stands Stortinget, the Norwegian Parliament. Several of Munch's most famous views of Karl Johan were painted from this spot. You can see one of them, Karl Johan's Gate, in the shopping mall further up the street.

First, though, pop in to the Grand Hotel, former haunt of poets, writers, and artists. The Noble Prize-winning writer Knut Hamsun was a regular customer, as was Munch himself. And legend has it that you could set your watch by the writer Henrik Ibsen's arrival each day.

On one wall is a mural by Per Krogh, son of Christian Krogh. Munch is pictured sitting at a table by the window with Hans Jaeger, a notorious libertine and radical. Here they drank and debated. They had much to debate. Kristiania, as Oslo was called at the time, was a small provincial city on the fringes of Scandinavia. Norwegians were thirsty for independence from their dominant neighbour, Sweden. Talk of war was in the air. There were strikes and demonstrations for jobs and higher wages.

Norwegian culture was stuck in a romantic past that had never really existed. Artists painted pictures of noble peasants in a country idyll. Munch and his contemporaries painted life as they saw it. In 1882 a group of artists staged a strike against the conservatism of the Art Association annual exhibition. Forming themselves into the Creative Artists' Union they exhibited in the shops of Karl Johan. Munch was to join them the following year. They believed that upheavals taking place out in the streets should have parallels in art and literature. Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Greig, Knut Hamsun and Munch helped to put Norway on a world stage.

Number 35 Karl Johan's Gate used to house one of the largest private galleries in Scandinavia, Blomqvists. From 1902 onwards Munch was to exhibit there many times.

Take the right turn into Universitet Gata, bringing you finally to the National Gallery. As well as Christian Krogh and Munch, works by many other leading Norwegian painters hang alongside Picassos, Braques, and Monets. But you – and most of the other visitors – are here to see the most famous version of The Scream.

But the trail is not quite over. From the gallery wander further along Universitet Gata until you reach the junction with Pilestredet. Look left, and you will see a couple of rundown houses that appear destined for demolition. The most dilapidated is number 30. The ground floor windows are boarded up and covered in fly posters. Where it isn't sprayed with graffiti, the stucco façade crumbles. Much of the roof has caved in, and has been replaced with plastic sheeting. On the gable wall a gigantic version of The Scream stares out. It was painted in black and white by students of Oslo's School of Architecture. This is the most important building from Munch's childhood, the house where he lived for seven years, from the age of three. Events that were to shape his life occurred here. His mother and his sister, Sophie, died in this house. And it was here that his Aunt Karen discovered him drawing on the kitchen floor with a lump of coal.

As the city councillors squabbled over whether to pull the building down for redevelopment, nature quietly got on with the task of demolition itself. Finally, in 2000, a resolution was passed to preserve it. So far, nothing has been done. Yet, while the council blustered, a group of anarchists showed what could be done at the tumbledown Blitz café next door. Murals reminiscent of 1960s rock psychadelia adorn one wall. Munch would have approved, although if he'd painted the murals the result might have been slightly less psychedelic.

Travellers' Guide

.Getting there: SAS (0845 607 2772, www.scandinavian.net) and British Airways (0845 77 333 77, www.ba.com) fly from Heathrow to Oslo; BA also flies from Manchester. From the airport, there are frequent fast trains to the city, taking 21 minutes.

Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com) flies from Stansted and Prestwick to Torp, 75 miles from Oslo, with a connecting bus link.

Scream scenes: Oslo's free National Gallery (00 47 22 20 04 04, www.museumsnett.no/nasjonalgalleriet) opens daily except Tuesday.

The Blitz Café (00 47 22 11 41 80 www.blitz.no) is at Pilestredet 30c.

A useful English-language guide is Munch In Oslo by Frank Hoifod, on sale in Oslo for 179 kroner (£15).

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