It was not Christian Krohg’s painting Leiv Eiriksson Discovering America from 1893 that enticed me to spend a Saturday at the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, but rather an event in the museum’s ongoing series ‘Queer Islamic Art’. But, yes, Krohg’s painting is on display there now, a little out of the way in a corridor on the first floor, having been brought out of storage after being the subject of an intense and toxic debate. When I took a look at it, a small row of people occupied the bench directly across from the picture, but whether they were there to actively study it and “form their own opinion,” as Director Karin Hindsbo invites us to, or whether they had simply found a place to rest, I have no idea.
Unfortunately, I often find that it is not the most important discussions about art that reach the major media and are commented upon by everyone from culture section writers to internet trolls, comedians, and populist politicians. This also holds true of “Krohg-gate,” which has rightly been called a storm in a teacup. In itself, it is not very important whether this particular painting by Krohg is on display or in storage given that he has thirteen other paintings in the museum’s current hang of its collection, and everyone still wholeheartedly agrees that he is among Norway’s historically most important painters. The reason I think the matter still merits comment is particularly associated with how the debate has unfolded.
The starting point was a quite decent art-historical debate about the National Museum’s presentation of works from its collection in the newspaper Klassekampen. Art historian Steinar Gjessing – known, among other things, for being an art consultant to two of the richest men in Norway, businessman Stein Erik Hagen and oil fund manager Nikolai Tangen – criticised the curatorial choices made for the collection exhibition and received a response from five of the museum’s curators. At this point, the matter was not specifically about Krohg’s painting, but about different attitudes towards the current presentation of the museum’s collection and to the concept of ‘canon’ which the National Museum is currently challenging, mainly by showing more women artists and working for greater diversity. But then the museum’s Director of Exhibitions and Collections Stina Högkvist, speaking in an interview in Aftenposten on 18 February, used the term “colonialist” to describe the painting, which was in storage at the time. And that’s when things went pear-shaped. Apparently, this was the limit of what certain people were able to tolerate in terms of new looks at Norway’s cultural heritage.
“The picture romanticises the Norwegians who went to America. It is a colonialist image,” Högkvist said, and many have pointed out that, given the current climate of public debate, she ought to have foreseen the reactions that followed. The day after the article was published, she publicly apologised and claimed that she did not think the image was colonialist. Shortly afterwards, Hindsbo also stepped forward to assure everyone that the museum was not engaging in “cancelling” and announced that the painting would be retrieved from storage and made accessible to the general public for a four-week period.
Högkvist’s choice of words may have been careless, but, for my part, I believe that the bigger problem is the fact that she retracted her statement instead of elaborating on it. Not only does it seem quite obvious that she meant what she said, but she was also absolutely right. Anyone who has understood that the Eurocentric notion of “discovering” an already populated continent is a fundamentally colonialist idea also understands that the title itself is enough to establish the ideological bias of the work. What is more, the context in which the painting was created can hardly be called anything other than colonialist.
Professor of art history at the University of Oslo, Øystein Sjåstad, who specialises in European painting from the period 1860 to 1900 and has studied Christian Krohg, explained the painting’s history in an essay in Morgenbladet on 24 February. The picture won a competition launched by a group of Norwegian Americans who wanted a heroic picture of Leiv Eiriksson to display at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas. Sjåstad’s description of the painting’s historical context leaves no room for doubt:
We must remember that the work was part of the ideology of the Chicago world’s fair, where Europeans were exhibited in The White City while non-white cultures were displayed in a separate section which featured villages where Indigenous People were exhibited like animals. This included several Native American tribes and the Sámi. Krohg’s painting did not emerge out of a neutral context, but from a colonial and racist context.
Sjåstad also pointed out that the painting in question has generally not held a central position in the museum’s hangs: “This is a work that has always gone in and out of storage. Only in our time has the picture become a national icon.” The Chicago patrons who commissioned the painting did not think it sufficiently National Romantic, and so donated it to the National Gallery in 1900. Since then, according to Sjåstad, the picture has mostly been on view in the Maritime Museum, except during the periods 2002 to 2005 and 2011 to 2019, when it hung in the stairwell of The National Gallery – and during the Nazi regime in the 1940s, when it was shown together with a bust of the head of the collaborationist government, Vidkun Quisling. “The picture is an expression of colonial heroism and white power at its most obvious: It was part of the Norwegian Americans’ ideological apparatus, and later of the Nazis’. Today, the painting serves the same function for right-wing radicals,” wrote Sjåstad.
The fact that the painting is “an expression of colonial heroism and white power” is, of course, not in itself a reason not to show it. But it would have been a rather peculiar and problematic move if the National Museum had elected to let that picture hold as prominent a place at the opening of the new museum as it had at the old National Gallery at the time of its closure in 2019.
Instead, visitors are now met by Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara’s Pile o´ Sápmi (2017), a shift which can be read as announcing the museum’s wish for renewal and its desire to promote a more contemporary understanding of what a national gallery can be. Sara’s work is a protest against the Norwegian state’s treatment of the Sámi people. Notably, it does not concern abuses in the past, but addresses violations of Indigenous rights that are still ongoing today. This week, we have seen footage of police carrying away young people in traditional dress demonstrating for Sámi rights. It could be objected that the National Museum’s central positioning of Sara’s work is a cosmetic move rather than a sign of fundamental structural changes. In any case, decolonisation has – contrary to what some pundits seem to believe – not come too far, either inside or outside the museum.
One thing that is quite clear is that many presumably competent people in this country need a better understanding of what colonialism really is, and of what Norway’s role has been – and still is – in establishing colonialist structures both past and present. If there is a tendency throughout Scandinavia to trivialise Nordic colonialism, the belief in national exceptionalism is particularly noticeable in Norway. The issue may well have to do with the fact that the nation’s independence and liberation from Denmark (1814) and Sweden (1905) is such a strong part of the Norwegian national narrative. It simply does not fit in with the Norwegian self-understanding to see ourselves as the colonists rather than the colonised.
The press release issued by National Museum regarding its decision to bring the painting out of storage promised to arrange presentations and debates about the picture. This sounds like a brilliant idea, certainly if those events become an arena for sharing knowledge and engaging in serious discussion. The National Museum cannot simply be a place where people are left to make up their own minds; it must also be a place where people can get the knowledge they need to ensure that their opinions are actually informed.
Whether we can consider the museum’s decision to retrieve Krogh’s work from storage wise depends largely on how the painting is contextualised. Until now, professionals outside the museum have been responsible for placing the painting within its historical context, which comes across as a weak and defensive move on the museum’s part. I hope that the National Museum’s retreat in this matter will not discourage more museum directors from standing up for their professional decisions in public. The National Museum will soon face a change of director when Hindsbo’s term expires on 1 June. There is reason to hope that whoever takes over the director’s chair will be someone who can be vocal about the museum’s professional integrity in the face of not only a brutal media reality where anti-intellectual populist forces set the agenda, but also elected politicians from the right- and left-wing alike who, in the last week or so, have proven a little too eager to proclaim how the National Museum should carry out its task.
