Sharjah24 – AFP: To Edvard Munch, they were his children. And like any doting father, he hated the idea of them straying too far from home.

Now, more than 26,000 artworks from the master expressionist's "family" -- including his best known piece, "The Scream" -- have moved under one roof in the enormous and custom-built MUNCH museum on the shore of Oslo Fjord.

Gone is the old, rundown and poorly secured Munch Museum in the Norwegian capital's outskirts -- from where a version of "The Scream" and another masterpiece, "Madonna", were stolen by armed robbers in 2004. 

On Friday, the new museum opens to the public smack dab in the heart of Oslo, in a luxuriously spacious modernist building that has sparked much controversy.

"This might be the biggest museum for a single artist," museum director Stein Olav Henrichsen says as he gives a tour of the building.

With 13 floors covering more than 26,000 square metres (280,000 square feet), the new building offers five times more exhibition space than the gloomy museum that until now housed Norway's national treasure.

A bachelor who had no children, Munch (1863-1944) bequeathed his work to the city of Oslo. He had originally intended to leave it to the Norwegian state, but changed his will at the last-minute to avoid the art falling into unwanted hands.