National Museum gets to pick and choose from Stein Erik Hagen’s private art collection – NRK

– It has become a huge collection, and many people have asked what will happen with it, I have not had a clear answer to it. Therefore, it is very nice to have gotten to this cooperation, says Hagen.

The investor and billionaire goes through the galleries at the National Museum in Oslo. Next year the museum will house an exhibition of works from the businessman’s private collection. And more to come in the years to come.

Sets collection available

A new agreement between the National Museum and the garden gives the museum the opportunity to pick and choose from the private collection garden has built through nearly 40 years.

the majority of the collection belongs formally Hagens investment company Canica, while parts owned by Hagen and his children.

– I lie not in what pictures they will tune out, I ask collection to disposal, so they get to pick and choose based on what they think appropriate, Hagen says to NRK.

Museum Director Audun Eckhoff is especially pleased to supplement the museum’s own collection of works by Norwegian modernist artists from the first half of the 1900s.

– the important thing now is that we get placed Canica collection where in many ways it belongs, in the Norwegian national collection context, it comes into its own with our pictures, said Eckhoff, who praises Hagens effort to have built up a large and important collection of Norwegian and Scandinavian art.

Museum of world

Eckhoff believes the agreement will really come into its own when the National Museum’s new premises scheduled to stand ready in 2020.

– the new museum on Vestbane the lot is almost twice as large as the museums we have from before. With the collection we get a grant that helps to make this a world-class museums, said Eckhoff.

The National Museum will no longer exhibit the work, others will be offered long-term loans.

– When we have loaned paintings earlier, we have said that they can have them as long as they hang on the walls, but if they go out of stock, we reserve the right to lend them to other museums. I think it’s important that these images are not dust down in a warehouse, but benefit the general public sight, says Hagen.

– There’s a certain prestige in it for you too?

– It is always prestige in having managed to collect images that are so interesting that major museums wish to borrow them and show them. It is of course very nice.