On Monday we wrote about the Munch Museum; today it’s the National Museum’s turn! As we’ve mentioned before, it’s Oslo’s newest museum, having opened just two months ago. It’s an imposing L-shaped building on the western part of the harbour, just behind the Nobel Peace Center. And it houses what were once three separate collections: the National Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design. The building is the largest museum in Scandinavia, and collection has some 45,000 objects. Even of the items on display we saw only a fraction, so this is an even more idiosyncratic take than usual.
The museum has organized the collection chronologically and thematically. As you go through the rooms, from the small collection of Greek and Roman art to contemporary stuff, labels alert you to the particular movements, trends, or developments represented in that room. (Signage is in Norwegian and English.) We’d not seen that before, and it points to the multiple functions of the place, which is a national showplace as well a teaching tool.
One of the things we liked most about the museum was the large number of women artists on display. Like, more than we have seen in most other museums combined. The museum has four paintings by the 17th-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi. These include a fantastic self-portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria and another which she did with her father, Orazio, of Judith with the Head of Holophernes, wherein the head resides prosaically, as if she were taking in the laundry.
We’ve liked Gentileschi for years, but neither of us had heard of Harriet Backer (1845–1932). She was a pioneering Norwegian painter best known for her interior scenes, which often portray women at their work. Her colours are beautiful and the paintings themselves are moving but unsentimental. John, to nobody’s surprise, took a particular fancy to this one.
One of Laurel’s favourite artists is Caspar David Friedrich, well known for his landscapes. We saw another side of him at the National Museum. They have a large number of his prints, many of which are smaller studies of ships, figures, and the like. Particularly impressive (and recalling his paintings) was the one below. Since we both like landscapes, we were delighted to learn about another Norwegian artist, Kitty Kielland (1843–1914), who painted both landscapes and portraits. You can get a good sense of her work from the painting we have below.
The most famous painting in the Museum, by a lot, is Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ or, to be more precise, the 1893 painting of ‘The Scream’, since Munch made other versions both on canvas and on paper. We had never realized just how much the colours in the famous version contribute to the feel of the painting. (There are also many versions of ‘The Scream’ in the Munch Museum.)
In sum: it’s a gorgeous, gigantic space. We were impressed by the things we had heard of as well as by the things we hadn’t. The collection is particularly strong from the Impressionists on. And we haven’t even mentioned the roof deck, where you can have food and drink and look out over the harbour.
