KUMU Art Museum

KUMU opened in 2006 in a building by the Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori, and it won European Museum of the Year two years later. The building is half buried in the limestone slope at the edge of Kadriorg park, so you enter at ground level and climb through it, with the galleries opening off a curved atrium.

What you actually see

• Four permanent floors - Estonian art from the eighteenth century to the present.
• The Soviet-era floor - official socialist realism shown alongside the unofficial art made in the same decades, without sorting the work into heroes and collaborators.
• The contemporary halls - changing exhibitions on the upper floors.
• The top terrace - a view back over the Kadriorg park.

When to go

Any season, since it is entirely indoors and one of the best rainy-day options in Tallinn. Weekday mornings are quietest. It combines naturally with Kadriorg: the palace and its foreign art collection are a ten-minute walk away and part of the same museum.

Honest expectations

The building is more immediately impressive than most of the collection, and visitors who do not read Estonian art as a subject sometimes find the earlier floors thin. The twentieth-century material is where the museum earns its reputation.

Labelling is in Estonian and English, but the detail is uneven between floors.

Nearby

Kadriorg Palace and park are next door. The Song Festival Grounds and the sea at Pirita are further along the same road.