From its “grey box-like” appearance and eye-popping price tag to protracted construction delays, Norway’s new National Museum has kept the critics busy.
Located on Oslo’s western waterfront, the £500m museum will be the biggest in the Nordic region when it opens on 11 June. Yet its director, Karin Hindsbo, has felt sufficiently contrite to apologise for extensive delays that kept renowned artworks such as Edvard Munch’s most famous version of The Scream out of public view for years.
“That we have not met the audience’s expectations in recent years, I’m sorry,” she wrote in 2020.
As the finishing touches are made before its grand opening (an entrance fee is yet to be decided upon, for example) Hindsbo now thinks things are coming together at a timely moment.
It is a museum on an epic scale. Across 13,000 sq metres of exhibition space there will be 5,000 works on show at the site off Oslo’s Rådhusplassen, making it bigger than Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum or the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Hindsbo says people will have choices and be offered guidance according to the time and interests that they have.
“But I would also say that maybe these days, when things have a tendency to move really really fast, I don’t think it is a bad thing to provide a space that one can stay in for many hours,” she says. “Maybe it is not so bad to get lost in art these days.”
The concept of the museum came together in the mid-2000s, but the wisdom of the Norwegian parliament’s decision in 2013 to combine the collections of four existing museums including the highly popular National Gallery has been hotly debated at every turn.
Hindsbo says the idea is a good one in that “people will be able to see the whole history of Norwegian cultural heritage and regional cultural inheritance in a global perspective under one roof”, and in conditions that best preserve and show off the pieces.
The range of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, to give its full name, is broad: from the medieval Baldishol tapestry and Chinese imperial porcelain to fashion, Norwegian glass cups of the 18th century and contemporary design and arts and crafts.
The second floor is dominated by the visual arts, from Dutch and Flemish landscape paintings to still lifes from the 17th century and Johan Christian Dahl’s 19th-century landscape masterpieces.
The museum’s Munch Room has some of the Norwegian painter’s most famous works, including one of his four versions of The Scream.
Crowning the building is a 2,400 sq metre Light Hall, visible for miles around at night thanks to 9,000 energy-efficient, adjustable LED lights.
To the critics who complain that that German-Italian architect Klaus Schuwerk has spent a fortune and eight years building what has been panned by some as a slate-covered grey box, Hindsbo says the point is how the works will be looked after and displayed inside.
The building on the former site of a railway station was designed to blend into its neighbourhood, Hindsbo says. “This is not a tall building, it is low. It is low-maintenance but high-quality and the issue of sustainability is important. All the materials are chosen in a 300-year scope, so nothing should be cast aside in 20 years’ time.”
“We should have vines growing on the facade, we have grass on the roof, and you don’t see that yet. And more important is the actual exhibition space, and my humble opinion is that it is a unique exhibition space – such amazing conditions for displaying our collection – and I think the audience will see that and appreciate that once we open.”
Hindsbo is likewise unmoved by those who don’t like the museum’s logo, a capital letter “N” followed by an “a” and an “m” cut in half. Some have suggested that it is an attempt to secure a snazzy acronym, in this case Nam, like MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art) in New York.
“Our logo is a logo and not a name”, says Hindsbo. “I actually think it works really well.”
She is more apologetic about the delays caused by construction complications and then the Covid pandemic, which resulted in some of Norway’s finest pieces of art being out of public view.
“It is not funny for a museum to have closed doors, it is not what we do,” she says.
In response, some of the most significant works that could be moved have been loaned out over the last year.
