The story
KODE is really several museums strung along a lake in the centre of Bergen, together holding one of the largest art collections in the Nordic countries. The jewel among them grew from a single donation: in 1916 the children of Rasmus Meyer, a Bergen businessman, gave the city their father's collection of Norwegian painting, at the time the most generous private gift the country had seen.
That gift made Bergen a place to see Edvard Munch. KODE holds one of the largest Munch collections anywhere, with some 50 paintings and many more works on paper, several of them versions of the anxious, hollow-faced figures he is known for. Alongside them hangs the golden age of Norwegian art, above all J.C. Dahl, the Bergen-born painter who first carried the country's wild mountain scenery to the rest of Europe.
The museums also keep silver and design, and, in a set of houses outside the city, the former homes of composers including Edvard Grieg.
