Norway’s National Museum Gets A Little Help from Country’s Leading Art Collector

The Canica Collection owned by Norway’s supermarket billionaire, Stein Erik Hagen will be supplementing the expansion of the Norway’s National Museum. You can see some of the items online but the rest will go on display next year, according to Forbes:

The Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Nasjonalmuseet) has been granted free access to roam Hagen’s collection, a 2000-piece compilation of Nordic and Northern European fine art from the 19th and 20th century, valued at 1 billion Norwegian Krone ($120 million).

Most of the art is owned by Canica A/S, the Hagen family investment firm, but it is Stein Erik Hagen who has spent 40 years collecting the pieces with help from art historian Steinar Gjessing, a former senior curator of the National Museum of Contemporary Art. The works collected show a large interest in surrealist, concretist and expressive tendencies within Nordic art, and include pieces by modern Scandinavian master, like Edvard Munch, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson and Asger Jorn. […]

The Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design will open a new museum building in Oslo in 2020, almost doubling the exhibition space compared to present museum venues.

Stein Erik Hagen Lets Museum Pick Freely From His $120 Million Art Collection (Forbes)