KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes is one of the largest museums for art, craft, design and music in the Nordic countries.
KODE has a unique combination of art museums and composers’ homes, of contemporary art, historical objects, concerts and parklands.
The museums stewards almost 50,000 objects ranging from paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, videos, musical instruments, furniture and works of fine craft and design. These objects can be experienced in four museum buildings in Bergen city centre (KODE 1, 2, 3 and 4), and in the homes of the composers Ole Bull, Harald Sæverud and Edvard Grieg.
Ole Bull Museum Lysøen, Harald Sæverud Museum Siljustøl and Edvard Grieg Museum Troldhaugen are part of KODE and represent a truly distinctive collection of composers’ homes. These museums organize over 400 concerts annually and also offer 900 acres of parkland and nature trails.
In the centre of Bergen, KODE 1, 2, 3 and 4 offer temporary exhibitions of art and design as well as extensive presentations of works by Edvard Munch, J.C. Dahl and Nikolai Astrup. The Rasmus Meyer Collection and the Silver Treasure are two of the most important collections KODE administers. Here you can also find a separate department devoted to contemporary art and an art museum especially for children: Kunstlab.
In 2014, Museumsforbund (the Norwegian museum association) awarded KODE the distinction of being ‘Museum of the Year’, one reason being that we have ‘worked seriously and innovatively to develop and clarify the museum’s role in society’.
Seven museums
KODE consists of seven museum buildings: Edvard Grieg Museum Troldhaugen, Harald Sæverud Museum Siljustøl, Ole Bull Museum Lysøen, and the long-established institutions Bergen Art Museum (which includes Lysverket, Stenersen and the Rasmus Meyer Collection) and Permanenten – West Norway Museum of Decorative Art. These five institutions were consolidated in 2006 and became a separate foundation in January 2007. The composers’ homes are part of KODE but retain their own names.
