The story
In Lillehammer, the town's cinema and its art museum were designed as one building. The architect Erling Viksjø, who also designed the government high-rise in Oslo, completed it in 1963, and it still holds the older collections. Beside it stands a wing by Snøhetta, the Norwegian architecture firm, opened in 1992 and used as the main venue for cultural events during the 1994 Winter Olympics. A glass bridge links the two, and between them lies a sculpture garden laid out by the artist Bård Breivik.
The collection began in 1921, when the merchant Einar Lunde and his wife Eva gave the town 107 Norwegian paintings. It now numbers about 1,800 works, from Hans Gude and Adolph Tidemand, the leading names of 19th-century Norwegian landscape and folk-life painting, to Henrik Sørensen and Jakob Weidemann. Among the pictures given by the antique dealer Oscar Johannessen in 1958 is one of Edvard Munch's earliest paintings, a small street view called From Saxegårdsgate, made around 1882, when he was about 18.
