National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design

About

The National Museum (Norwegian: Nasjonalmuseet, officially the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design) is a museum in Oslo, Norway which holds the Norwegian state's public collection of art, architecture, and design objects. The collection totals over 400,000 works, amongst them the first copy of Edvard Munch's The Scream from 1893. The museum is state-owned and managed by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. The National Museum was established in 2003 by the merging of the Museum of Architecture, the Museum of Industrial Art, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Gallery of Norway. In 2022, the museum opened its new building at Vestbanehallen at the centre of Oslo, housing the entirety of the collections from these previous museums. The current director of the museum is Karen Hindsbo.

A cohesive new building was a precondition for establishment of the National Museum in 2003, by which time the facilities housing the other museums destined to be consolidated there had all been determined to be too small.

Architecture competitions for expansion at Tullinløkka were previously held in 1972 and 1995 but were inconclusive.

In the spring of 2008 the government decided that the new building for the National Museum would be located at Vestbanen in place of the old Oslo West Station train station at Aker Brygge. It was originally planned to open in 2020. In November 2010 the German architecture company Kleihues + Schuwerk won the international architecture competition with the project Forum Artis.

In spring 2012 the pre-project was completed and delivered to the culture department. The government presented the project on 22 March 2013 with a price of approximately 5.3 billion Norwegian kroner. On 6 June 2013 the Stortinget decreed the new building to be within a cost frame of 5,327 billion kroner.

The National Gallery was closed temporarily from 13 January 2019 until the new National Museum opened. The gallery served as storage for the collections until its move to the new National Museum. The Museum for Contemporary Art was permanently closed on 3 September 2017, while the Art Industry Museum closed on 16 October 2016.

The new museum building was constructed in Vestbanen, and opened in June 2022.

The building has been widely derided by critics, who have said it resembles a prison and described it as the "national prison."

Main articles: National Gallery (Norway) and Paus collection

The National Gallery was established in 1842 as the Norwegian States Central Museum for Visual Arts. Since 1882 its location has been on Universitetsgata in Oslo, in a building designed by Heinrich Ernst and Adolf Schirmer. The building's exterior and interior was listed by Riksantikvaren (Cultural Heritage) in January 2012.

Art historian Jens Thiis was director of The National Gallery between 1908 and 1941. Thiis was internationally oriented and purchased a number of key works for the museum's collection. During this period, the museum also received large donations from industrial heirs Olaf Schou (1909), papal chamberlain and count Christopher Paus (1918), and Chr. Langaard (1922).

Count Christopher Paus amassed one of the largest collections from classical antiquity in Northern Europe, known as the Paus collection. He donated his collection to the then-National Gallery from 1918 and was considered "the founder of the National Gallery's antiquities collection" by art historian and National Antiquarian Harry Fett.

Paus was an heir to one of Norway's largest timber companies ( Tostrup & Mathiesen ) as well as a relative of Henrik Ibsen, and the only Ibsen relative who ever visited Ibsen during his decades in exile. From the 1880s Paus lived in Rome, where he became a papal chamberlain and count, as well as an art collector. During that time, Rome was marked by significant expansion and extensive construction work, which unearthed many archaeological finds. At the same time, many artifacts ended up on the market because several Italian noble families who had collected them were unable to handle the transition from feudalism to a modern society. It was also much easier to export antiquities from Italy during this period. Both Paus and other foreign art collectors, such as Carl Jacobsen, built large collections during this period and brought them back to their native countries. Paus turned down an offer from Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek to acquire the collection, instead donating it to the Norwegian government and the National Gallery where it was meant to become the foundation of a Norwegian museum or department dedicated to classical antiquity. The collection includes busts of the emperors Trajan, Galba, Lucius Verus, and (presumably) Commodus, the empress Julia Domna, a bust of Cleopatra's grandson Ptolemy of Mauretania, and several busts of Roman women.

The museum has a vast collection of Norwegian Romantic Nationalism movement paintings, as well as Edvard Munch's works. The main part of the collection of older art consists of Norwegian paintings and sculptures from the 1800s.

Edvard Munch 's Scream and some of his other renowned works are among the highlights of the National Gallery's collection. Other significant artists include J.C Dahl, Adolph Tidemand, Hans Gude, Harriet Backer, and Christian Krohg. The collection from the 20th century shows the evolution within Norwegian visual arts with references and key works from Nordic and foreign art within paintings, sculpture, photos, video and other mediums.

In 1990 the museum's collection from after 1945 was transferred to the newly established Museum of Contemporary Art.

The launch of a new basic exhibition "Everyone is Talking About the Museum" in 2005 increased visitor numbers but also had some negative reaction.

The most heavily debated decision was to divide the museum's ‘Munch Room’ and show Munch's works together with other contemporary painters. Another decision was to replace the chronological principle with a thematic one. The permanent exhibition was once again revisited in 2011. ‘The Dance of Life: Collections from the Ancients To 1950’, the Munch Room and the chronological principle has been reinstated. The new permanent exhibition has been praised as ‘a short version of the world’s art history instead of a revisit of the museum’s own collection’.

The museum's extensive graphic and drawing collection includes almost 50,000 Norwegian and foreign works, and spans from the end of the 1400s to current day. Central artists include Durer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Goya, Picasso, Manet, Rafael, Rubens, Muncb, Tidemand, Dahl, Werenskiold, and Kittelsen. Newer Norwegian graphics and drawn art is also well represented.

The Museum for Contemporary Art was established in 1988 and was located at Bankplassen 4 in Oslo. The collection consisted of works from the former National Exhibition and National Gallery, including later purchases. The 1907 museum building, designed by Ingvar Hjorth, formerly housed the Norwegian Bank. The museum opened for the public in 1990 and became a part of the National Museum in 2003.