The largest art museum in the Nordic countries, opened in 2022, holding the version of The Scream you know.
The Nasjonalmuseet opened in June 2022, merging the old National Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design and the Architecture Museum into one building beside the City Hall.
At around 54,600 square metres it is the largest art museum in the Nordic countries, with roughly 6,500 works on display out of a collection many times that.
The 1893 Scream
The version everybody has seen — the 1893 painting — is here, not at MUNCH.
It hangs in a room with Madonna, The Dance of Life, The Sick Child and Self-Portrait with Cigarette, and the room is deliberately arranged so that you come upon it rather than queue for it.
Written faintly in pencil on the painting, in the sky, is a sentence: “Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!” — “Could only have been painted by a madman.” Analysis in 2021 established that the handwriting is Munch’s own, added some years after he painted it, apparently in response to a critic who had called him insane.
Norwegian romantic landscape
The other reason to come, and the one visitors do not expect.
J. C. Dahl, Thomas Fearnley, Hans Gude and Adolph Tidemand — the nineteenth-century painters who essentially invented the visual idea of Norway at exactly the moment Norway was inventing itself as a nation.
Tidemand and Gude’s Bridal Procession in Hardanger (1848) is the single most reproduced image in Norwegian history and is on the wall here.
Harald Sohlberg’s Winter Night in the Mountains was voted the national painting of Norway. It is very strange and much better in person.
The rest
International art: El Greco, Cranach, Rubens, Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse. A good collection rather than a great one, and it does not pretend otherwise.
The design and decorative arts collection — silver, glass, furniture and textiles, including the Baldishol tapestry, a fragment woven around 1200 and the only surviving Norwegian tapestry from the period.
The Light Hall on the top floor — 2,400 square metres lit by 9,000 LEDs behind translucent marble, used for temporary exhibitions, and an extraordinary room in its own right.
Contemporary Norwegian and international work, and the architecture collection.
Practical
Charged. Under-18s free. Closed one day a week.
There is a rooftop terrace with a view over the fjord, free to reach from the Light Hall.
It is five minutes from the City Hall and the Nobel Peace Center, and about fifteen from Aker Brygge along the water.
Doing this and MUNCH on the same day is possible and is a mistake. Give them a day each, or half a day each and accept that you are skimming.
More Museums
The Munch Museum
Thirteen floors of a leaning tower that Oslo voted against, holding almost everything Munch owned when he died.
The Viking Ship Museum
Closed. The best-preserved Viking ships in the world are behind hoardings until the new museum opens.
The Fram Museum
The ship that went furthest north and furthest south, indoors, and you can walk all over it.