Winter isn’t all bad – these “sublime” landscapes of the frozen North from the turn of the 20th Century offer us a way into resilience – and an “acceptance of the seasonality of life”.
With its bare trees, long nights and icy temperatures, it’s perhaps unsurprising that, culturally in the Northern Hemisphere, we seem so conditioned to complain about winter. Yet, as the author Katherine May points out in her 2020 book Wintering, winter is also a valuable time for rest and retreat. “Winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit,” she writes. Its “starkness”, she argues, re-sensitises us, and “can reveal colours that we would otherwise miss”.
For Nordic countries, where, in some regions, the season can last more than six months, making peace with winter is a necessity, with concepts such as the Norwegian friluftsliv (embracing the natural world) and the Danish hygge (hunkering down with simple comforts) offering fresh perspectives on cold weather.
At the turn of the 20th Century, the frozen North – with its vast fjords, mystical boreal forests and radiant light – became a powerful muse for artists such as Hilma af Klint, Edvard Munch and Harald Sohlberg. These artists immersed themselves in these cold climates, and developed a specifically Nordic style of painting imbued with their emotional responses to the landscape. Around 70 of these intensely atmospheric, expressionist works by artists from Scandinavia, Finland and Canada are being showcased in a new exhibition, Northern Lights, a cross-Atlantic collaboration that debuts at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, before travelling to New York’s Buffalo AKG Art Museum in August. It was natural that these painters should be drawn to these wintery scenes, Ulf Küster, the exhibition’s curator, tells the BBC. “In Nordic landscapes, snow is a very dominant factor of life from October to late April… It’s just this massive presence of white and nature and wilderness and vastness that really defines this landscape, and I think these painters have found a very interesting response to that.” This burst of Nordic landscape painting was also a response to the changes that the painters perceived as a result of population growth and industrialisation. “There was a big desire in the late 19th Century to return to pure nature and the simple life,” explains Küster. “You had these highly industrialised countries and pollution, and the pureness of white snow must have been quite a contrast.”
Many of these northern regions were comparatively untouched by change, and featured vast, unpopulated vistas that were inherently painterly. Even today, Norway has a population of just 5.5 million, but a length of around 1,600km; while around three-quarters of Finland is still forested. To convey this scale, these paintings often adopt unconventional compositions where the view appears to stretch beyond the canvas. They are “boundless”, says Küster. “They don’t have borders”. This is reinforced by the bird’s-eye view adopted in works such as View from Pyynikki Ridge (1900) by the Finnish artist Helmi Biese. “It’s as if the artists have used a drone,” remarks Küster.
The height and scope of these unpopulated views also convey a sense of isolation and loneliness. Harald Sohlberg, whose luminescent 1914 version of Winter Night in the Mountains is widely considered to be the national painting of Norway, wrote: “The longer I stood gazing at the scene, the more I seemed to feel what a solitary and pitiful atom I was in an endless universe… It was as if I had suddenly awakened in a new, unimagined and inexplicable world… Above the white contours of a northern winter stretched the endless vault of heaven, twinkling with myriads of stars. It was like a service in some vast cathedral.”
It was this search for solitude that doubtless drew the Swedish artist Anna Boberg to the Norwegian archipelago of Lofoten, a remote location steeped in Viking folklore and, according to her 1901 memoir, “the apotheosis of Arctic beauty and wilderness”. It was here, dressed head-to-toe in seal and reindeer fur, that she produced her Northern Lights (1901) painting, most likely sketched en plein air. In a commanding scene that speaks to the Romantic notion of “the sublime“, prismatic streaks of light descend from the heavens dwarfing the snowy landscape.
Boberg’s awe when confronted with this dazzling wintry world with its unique light is clear. “What really drove these people was to find a response to the extremities of nature – the very essence of snow, winter and ice.” explains Küster. To achieve this, they would “get as close to nature as possible”, he says. Far from hiding from the harsh winter, Boberg and her contemporaries immersed themselves in the landscape. “They are painters who really wanted to paint the experience, to feel the extreme temperature and the snow blindness,” says Küster. Munch, he continues, had outdoor studios, and would leave his paintings outside “just to let nature test them”, while some of the Canadian painters would paddle out on to lakes and paint from their canoes.
