Moderna Museet

Moderna Museet is Sweden's national museum of modern and contemporary art — a Rafael Moneo-designed building on the island of Skeppsholmen that houses one of the finest collections of 20th and 21st-century art in Europe. The collection includes works by Picasso, Dalí, Matisse, Rauschenberg, and Warhol alongside major Swedish artists (Hilma af Klint, whose abstract paintings predated Kandinsky by several years and are now recognised as among the earliest abstract works in Western art).

The museum's island location — connected to the city by a small bridge, surrounded by water on three sides, with views of Gamla Stan and Djurgården — gives it a setting that few museums can match. Skeppsholmen itself is a peaceful island of museums and maritime buildings that contrasts sharply with the commercial energy of the city centre a five-minute walk across the bridge.

The permanent collection is free (temporary exhibitions charge admission), which makes Moderna Museet one of the most generous major art museums in Europe. The Hilma af Klint works — enormous abstract canvases painted between 1906 and 1915 that were kept secret during the artist's lifetime and only exhibited publicly from the 1980s — have become the museum's most celebrated holdings since a major retrospective at the Guggenheim brought af Klint to international attention.