Minneapolis Institute of Arts ~ Nordic Landscape Painting, 1840–1910

Written by Mike Collett-White Wednesday, 18 August 2010 21:31

Minneapolis, MN - This summer the Minneapolis Institute of Arts presents nineteenth-century masterworks of landscape painting from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland in a major exhibition.  A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting, 1840–1910 features more than one hundred paintings that include exceptional loans from collections of the Nordic National Galleries and showcases iconic works by important artists such as Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Carl Larsson, August Strindberg, Harald Sohlberg, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Eero Järnefelt, and Johan Christian Dahl.  The exhibition is on view at the MIA, its exclusive U.S. venue, June 24 through September 2, 2007.

Featuring 107 paintings, A Mirror of Nature illuminates the distinctive Nordic contribution to the artistic representation of landscapes in the nineteenth century.  The exhibition explores Nordic attitudes toward nature, and the significance of landscape in Nordic culture and thinking.  Landscape painting assumed particular importance around the middle of the nineteenth century, when landscape subjects became crucial symbols in Nordic countries’ search for national identity.  At the same time, the landscape art of the region was open to wider European influences.

This exhibition was organized by the Nordic National Galleries. Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation.  Additional support has been provided by U.S. Trust.

Exhibition Details
Works included in the exhibition are grouped thematically under five headings: Nordic Sublime, Close to Nature, In the Open Air, Evocative Landscape, and Landscapes of the Mind.  This thematic structure also reflects the chronological development of landscape painting, from the heroic, romantic wildernesses of the 1840s to the dreamy, inward-looking mental landscapes of the turn of the nineteenth century.

Nordic Sublime: The Norwegian Peder Balke’s The Jostedal Glacier, from the 1840s, illustrates the first theme of this exhibition: the sublime dimension of landscape, in its original sense as overwhelming, even terrifying beauty.  In this panorama of the largest glacier in mainland Europe, framed by cloud-encircled mountain peaks, Balke (1804–87) presents nature in all its majesty.  Balke shared his interest in majestic landscape views with the most influential of Norwegian painters, Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857). No one was to play a more significant role than the Dresden-based Dahl in introducing the Nordic mountain landscape to the European art market.

Close to Nature: This section of the exhibition represents a movement away from the heroic, toward a depiction of landscape rooted in reality.  An important first sign of a closer engagement between art and reality was artists’ growing tendency to produce painted studies directly from nature, preparatory to finishing their works in the studio.  For example, Danish artist Christen Købke (1810–48) painted most of his landscapes near Copenhagen, selecting subjects from the partially built-up suburbs.  In A View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro, 1838, Købke depicts a scene of two women watching a rowboat on a lake in the light of the setting summer sun.

In the Open Air: The third theme of the exhibition is closely linked to the ascendance of plein air (outdoor) painting in Nordic countries in the 1880s.  This phase was marked by revolts against the art academies and a mass exodus of young artists to Paris, because finishing a picture entirely outdoors spoke more to the eye than to the mind.  Upon on returning home, Nordic painters who had trained in France found the silvery haze of the French tradition totally unsuited to a landscape defined by its clarity of light.  Carl Larsson’s large canvas Open-Air Painter, 1886, is an eloquent symbol of this break with tradition. In the painting, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1886, Larsson (1853–1919) chose a prosaic, wintry back garden in Stockholm for the setting.

Evocative Landscape: Realism enjoyed a brief flowering, and from the mid-1880s on the young Nordic artists who traveled abroad began to return.  The result was an almost complete breakthrough for mood-evoking, symbolic landscapes around the middle of the 1890s.  The first clear examples of this approach were created by a group of Norwegian painters who gathered in the summer of 1886 at Fleskum farm, west of Oslo.  Among those who have become well known were Kitty Kielland, Eilif Peterssen, and Christian Skredsvig. Peterssen’s Summer Night, 1886, conveys an intensity of mood and sense of presence beyond what is visible.  This vague, symbolic impression of something beneath the surface sets this landscape apart from Realism.

Landscapes of the Mind: Symbolism’s subjective perception of landscape took a number of artists beyond the bounds of the evocative landscape into the manner of the final section of the exhibition.  Several nineteenth-century Nordic artists, including Lars Hertervig (1830–1902), in the grip of mental illness, had crossed over into the realm of the inner landscape.  Others, such as Edvard Munch (1863–1944), were eventually to refine the subjective dimension to such a degree that their landscapes became pictures of the mind, rather than impressions of the outer world.  Moonlight, 1895, is a major work among Munch’s landscapes, and shows how far he could go in the direction of simplifying nature’s forms without losing their anchor in observed or experienced reality.  He imbues this painting with distinctive intensity and deep emotion.  A few vertical tree trunks frame a serene view whose contemplative mood is interrupted by the slight agitation of the undulating shoreline and the moon’s reflection in the water.

Catalogue
The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910 is published by the Statens Museum for Kunst on behalf of the National Nordic Galleries.  This 312-page hardcover catalogue is available in English at the MIA shop for $49.95.

Tour Venues
The tour venues are the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (April 21–August 27, 2006), the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (September 30, 2006–January 14, 2007), the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (February 15–May 20, 2007), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (June 24–September 2, 2007), and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (October 6, 2007–January 20, 2008).

About the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), home to one of the finest encyclopedic art collections in the country, houses nearly 100,000 works of art representing more than 5,000 years of world history.  Highlights of the permanent collection include European masterworks by Rembrandt, Poussin, and van Gogh; modern and contemporary painting and sculpture by Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Stella, and Close; as well as internationally significant collections of prints and drawings, decorative arts, Modernist design, photographs, and Asian, African, and Native American art.  General admission is always free.  For more information, call (612) 870-3131 or visit www.artsmia.org