The banquet hall of Oslo City Hall in 1957, Midelfart’s painting on the far wall. Photo by Gunnar Engebretsen, National Library of Norway, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The short end wall of the banquet hall in Oslo City Hall is covered by a painting of people bathing along the fjord. Somewhere in it, a boy points and sticks out his tongue at a door.

The painter was Willi Midelfart (1904–1975). His Det gror (“It grows” or “It sprouts”) is an oil painting, not the fresco it is sometimes called. It began as an entry in the competition to decorate the new City Hall in 1937–38, and the commission that followed ran from 1939 to 1950, the year the building opened. It shows summer life on the Oslo fjord, and critics have read it both as a vitalist hymn to the joy of life, in the manner of Munch, and as a socialist utopia: a classless future at the water’s edge.

The door is the story. The banquet hall sits beside a kitchen, and Midelfart composed the work for a single door into it. After a second door was cut through the wall, he had to repaint parts of the picture. His answer, according to Norwegian Wikipedia’s account of the hall, was to paint in a small boy who points at the offending door and sticks out his tongue. The 1957 photo above shows both doors in the lower edge of the painting.

Atlas Obscura’s telling adds an architect who ordered the door and a door now bricked up on the other side. We could not confirm either. The Norwegian sources mention only the second door and the kitchen, and name no architect in the episode; Arnstein Arneberg and Magnus Poulsson designed the building as a whole. Nothing we could reach says whether the door is open or sealed.

Critics were not warm. The jury’s reception of Det gror was reserved, and the Norwegian Artists’ Lexicon says the painting got a difficult placing, with two disfiguring doors through the picture. The small act of protest may be the part of the painting people remember best.

To see it, walk in. The City Hall is free and open daily from 9:00 to 16:00 (closed on Sundays from October 2026), with a security check at the entrance. The banquet hall is a working reception room, though, and the city warns that parts of the ceremonial wing can be closed even when the building is open. Check the City Hall’s opening hours page before a trip made for this alone, and look to the painting’s southwest corner first.