Your coldness starts "almost after 1900". Room 054 is the decade or two before that, and it is where the decisions were taken that everything after 1900 builds on. The Norwegians were there: room 053 hangs Thaulow's, Heyerdahl's, Krohg's and the young Munch's Paris next to Monet and Gauguin, so the network question comes built in.
Cézanne's Still Life against Balthasar van der Ast's Still Life with Fruit and Shells (room 034, Detail). Two tables of fruit, 260 years between them. Both painters spent the hours on the fruit. What did each of them think an apple was for?
Excluded from the official art show, Manet built his own pavilion and painted the fair from the hill. A picture about being outside. Mme Manet in the Conservatory (1879) shows a winter garden that was the latest fashion, la vie moderne as a stage set.
The fruit is built up "by using various hues", not drawn. Count the apples: how many colours are there in one? This is the direct ancestor of Picasso's Guitar (Form) and the most useful ten minutes of the year for the modern question. Cézanne's Seated Man (1898–1900) also hangs here.
Painted in the asylum year at Saint-Rémy. Ask the historical question first: Who was it painted for? Nobody, and that is new. The aesthetic question comes last.
The museum's text says the motif itself "was merely a pretext": Gauguin "wanted above all to view the canvas as an abstract, decorative surface". Read that sentence and decide whether you can see the surface, or only the pretext. The same goes for Landscape from Brittany (1889).
Room 054. Painted from a boat out on the river one summer morning, according to the museum's text. Degas' Morning Toilet and the two bronzes belong to the same room.
Courbet and Delacroix (Lion by its Den, 1847) are the "before": roughly Dahl's contemporaries, in France.
Room 053. Here also hang Thaulow's From Paris (1879), Heyerdahl's At the Window (1881) and Krohg's The Swedish Painter Karl Nordström (1882), with Monet's Spring by the Seine (1878) and Gauguin's Interior from the Artist's Home (1881) hung among them.
Room 067. Here also hang Modigliani's Young Woman (1918), Matisse's The Bronze Figure (1908), Kirchner's The Nurse (1917–18) and Beckmann's The Wolf-Fish (1929).
From 1915: the war as a room full of naked conscripts.
Room 067 has five canvases by Karsten, among them Consumption (c. 1907). He is the Norwegian who went furthest with colour, and the painter in this group most likely to hold you.
The visit fits best between The circle and Form. It is the missing step between Backer's Paris and Picasso's guitar. The rules for the modern rooms apply from room 054.
What did the Norwegians take home from room 053, and what did they leave on the wall?
Nearly all of room 054 came to Oslo early and deliberately. Jens Thiis, director from 1908, bought Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh when buying them was a scandal, and was attacked in the press for it. Read the acquisition lines for the years. The chain of viewers here also includes the people who thought these pictures did not belong in a national gallery at all.
Describe the pictures from memory, without looking at them, and record a voice note.