Moments from National Museum of Norway

Norway's National Museum opened in 2022 in Oslo, a large new building deliberately built to consolidate several previously separate institutions, the National Gallery, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, into a single collection under one roof, making it the largest art museum in the Nordic region. Among its holdings is a version of Edvard Munch's The Scream, one of several the artist made across different media, displayed in a dedicated room that tends to draw the heaviest foot traffic in the building, much as the painting's reputation as one of the most recognizable images in Western art would suggest.

Because the museum only opened relatively recently, its layout and wayfinding are more legible than older institutions cobbled together over a century of piecemeal expansion, worth appreciating on a purely practical level after visiting older European museums where finding a specific gallery can be its own challenge. Give real time to the design and decorative arts holdings alongside the paintings, the consolidation means Norwegian design history, furniture, textiles, applied arts, sits genuinely integrated with the fine art collection rather than segregated in a separate, easily skipped building.