Norwegian Magic and Memories, at the Clark Art Institute

Bonfires on a midsummer eve, mountain marigolds, plus a French rhinoceros

I ’d been waiting for the Clark Art Institute’s new exhibition, Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway, for a long time. The Clark’s summer shows are, to me, the start of the season. They’re almost always bespoke in theme. The museum is intuitive in its selection of the best art and has the clout to get whatever loans it wants. Its shows, even the bow-wow ones, are always beautifully presented. The Clark has a country setting and lots of French and American landscapes, so it’s a place for indoor and outdoor enjoyment. It’s an academic institution, too, so its exhibitions are scholarly.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a survey show at the Phillips Collection in Washington displaying Scandinavian art from the mid 19th century to today. With only one Munch, the Phillips show introduced a world of artists and movements new to me and the distinct aesthetics of a place I barely knew aside from the Vikings, Greta Garbo, and The Scream. Astrup (1880–1928) is well known in Norway but not here. The Clark hired MaryAnne Stevens, the curator emeritus at the Royal Academy and one of the finest curators in the English-speaking world. I knew it would be memorable, in the best way.

The Astrup show was postponed for a year because of the pandemic. I waited. My hopes weren’t disappointed.

Looking at Midsummer Eve Bonfire, from 1915, how can anything not think, “This is something I haven’t seen before.” It’s a six-footer, so in size only it makes a statement. It depicts St. John’s Night and observes St. John the Baptist’s birthday. In spirit, though not sentiment, it’s Norway’s Halloween and Fourth of July. It’s a couple of days after the summer solstice. A brilliant orange and red bonfire is the magnet, lighting, or, better, jolting a dozen greens.

It’s part bacchanal, part hootenanny, part revival. It’s a rural scene, so, since I’m a rural person, I assume people work physically, farmers or craftsmen. These people live close to nature, tend to be governed by not clock time but nature’s cycles, and are more religious than, say, people on the Upper West Side. Living by the laws of God and nature, they don’t party often, but when they do, they party hearty.

It’s one of several bonfire scenes in the show, each different, and each with a drama and weirdness that’s not German, not Italian or Spanish, and certainly not French or British. Astrup was local. He chased what he called “the smell and feel of old and hearten religions, the land filled with legend, and the crude colors,” crude meaning raw and real, with no pastels and no fad colors.

Yet Astrup doesn’t paint fjords. He’s not a Norwegian Bierstadt, and he inspires not awe but contemplation. His landscapes are entirely local, from Jolster, inland, about 30 miles from the North Sea and between Bergen and Trondheim. Astrup grew up in what city slickers in Norway would consider “out West,” as the son of an old-fashioned Lutheran pastor, not Jonathan Edwards among the glaciers but not one who’d suggest, ever, that Jesus was anyone’s best bud. Althus, his village, has fewer than 3,000 people scattered around a big lake near a glacier.

Astrup puttered around Oslo and Paris, learned art basics there but not in an academic, degreed way. He worked for a time as an artist in Oslo but, in his 20s, returned to Jolster. He lived there until he died. In his lifetime, he was well known, though not beyond Norway, and made a modest living.

His paintings and prints are both mundane and magical, and that’s a trick. Astrup painted his home and his landscape, but there’s an evocative twist in this. The exhibition and catalogue tell us he painted what he remembered as a child, down to the last shrub, deleting what was new. This is merely explanatory. It seems clear to me, knowing next to nothing about Astrup, that memory is a big part of his work.

The exhibition is organized chronologically, more or less. His bonfire paintings come toward the end of his life, but they’re of a piece with his early work. A Clear Night in June, from around 1906, tells us there’s enchantment in the air. It’s the ho-hum village center, a clump of buildings seen from the old parsonage where he grew up. Many different greens look like velvet. There’s lots of rain in that part of Norway, so, when it’s not winter, the look is lush and intensely green.

Astrup looked for the perfect marigold marsh. Yellow set against green pulses. It’s prosaic with dazzle. The village isn’t derelict, but it’s very modest, and the mountain is looming and silent but not menacing. Both give the tiny, wild, simple marigolds free rein. Each dab seems like a tiny, unexpected, radiant sun. Grey Spring Evening with Fruit Trees in Bloom, from 1909, shows a little white farmhouse, a shed, two hills, and a distant mountain, allowing a big, blooming apple tree, a riot of pinks, to steal top billing.

There are three different takes on the old parsonage in the show. The Parsonage from 1908 is the oddest. Astrup depicts it from a steep angle. There’s a close-up view with the house flush with the picture plane and another with a child peering into a window. It’s an unassuming rural parsonage. Astrup doesn’t seem to think it’s creepy, eerie, or anything approaching the Bates Motel. The parsonage, though, clearly looms large in his life. The paintings feel autobiographical. They’re not studies in form. Astrup is telling us, “I picked this motif because it means something personal to me.” Indeed, his take on the old parsonage defines him.

These and other Astrups are not topographical paintings or en plein air, putting aside the strong sense of place. Their simplicity and rich colors are what a child remembers. A child’s world is home, augmented by fairy tales, and it’s probably truer than not that our memories of childhood become fairy tales too, or at least accurate memories with a fairy-tale or folkloric fringe. The parsonage pictures have some of this. When Astrup painted them, it was an old, unused parsonage and partly dismantled. Astrup presents them not as he saw it as an adult artist but as he remembered it as a child.

Interior Still Life: A Christmas Morning, from around 1926, depicts a world as a child would remember it. The child in the painting is more of a ghost, suggesting a visitor from one state of being to another, but what’s seen or recalled is a burgeoning selection of fruit and vegetables, and I use “burgeoning” because the food on the table seems to grow on its own. A boldly patterned tablecloth is both humble and animated. It’s Christmas morning experienced as a child craves: alone, before anyone else is up.

Astrup isn’t a painter who embraces tight, precise finish. His application of paint leaves a gauzy look, and this promotes close looking since isolated passages, seen on their own as painted surfaces, are luminous and abstract.

His art demands close looking. Not all his paint handling is thick. Some of his surfaces are thinly painted and scraped, making them look ethereal.

Astrup was a color trailblazer. “I wish to oppose all these systems in art, both complementary color systems and the rainbow systems, and retain only the original, first color perceptions.” In the 1880s and 1890s, systems were the rage in avant-garde French art not so much as a sign of conformity but as a measure of how many distinct styles and schools Impressionism bred. Each had its own look and codes. It’s hard to think of Norway as a colorful place, but Jolster has a climate all its own and a light we southerners don’t know. Astrup made the most of local color, exaggerating it here and there but, like Gauguin and Van Gogh, taking what he saw and making it his own, without theories.

Astrup’s woodcuts are a revelation, electric and unique. He called them “modern oil prints.” No two impressions are the same. He used multiple blocks for color, printed each run himself to encourage different innings from impression to impression, and then did some hand coloring to get what he wanted. Yes, he’s indebted to Japanese prints, and, yes, he’s part of the broad print revivals of his day, but he makes his own way and creates work that’s his and his alone. Technically, they’re astonishing. A series called “Foxgloves” from the late Teens and early Twenties is a chromatic feast and the product of nearly a dozen different blocks and a saint’s patience as each printing of each color had to follow Astrup’s design and contours.

Two of the sections in the show highlight his prints. One is more technical, giving us a tutorial on woodblock printmaking using his work, and this is very satisfying. The next space examines the overlap between his painting and print aesthetic. Artists who make prints and paintings will tell us that the two media are of a piece, but art historians separate them as if the artist is schizophrenic.

The Astrup show nicely merges the two, as the artist would have wanted.

It wasn’t until I read the catalogue that I got a sense of Astrup the man, and as artists go, he was self-doubting to an extreme, neurotic extent. A bad review paralyzed him. He never worked in a vacuum. He was well-read and knew the contemporary art world. He seems to have had crisis after crisis, one or two emotional, some professional, and some entirely understandable since he had eight children to support. A crisis in 1911 — he got mixed reviews for an Oslo solo show — pushed him to go to Berlin for a few months. He didn’t come back a changed artist but, more precisely, as an artist willing and able to take his art philosophy to the next level.

Astrup is a resolute representative painter. That doesn’t change. Post-Berlin, landscapes such as Spring in Jolster, done after 1925, and Rhubarb at Sandalstrand and his bonfire scenes are denser. Foregrounded rhubarbs, a modest few garden rows, a cabbage, or a goose seem like giants. His colors, never for the faint of heart, are bolder. Grain Poles, from 1920, shows crops drying on poles, but the dozen or so poles, dense with foliage, look as if they’re on the move. Astrup’s people either shrink, as in the bonfire pictures, or grow impossibly large. Here, again, is the eye of a child remembering a past where everything seemed bigger. He plays more with depth, conflating space, and his work is never whimsical like, say, that of Chagall, another painter of long-ago village life. But both make memory a compelling subject.

The book proposes that Astrup was smitten by Kandinsky and Lovis Corinth in Berlin in 1911 and also that he saw work by Matisse. It’s good to be reminded that he was a worldly and very modern artist. The Berlin adventure aside, Astrup and his wife weren’t hermits. In 1922, they made a long trip to Venice, Naples, and Algeria. All of these experiences had to juice his already adventurous sense of color.

The catalogue is up to the Clark’s usual standard, which is superlative. Robert Ferguson’s catalogue essay is revelatory in understanding both Norway’s cultural evolution and Astrup as a figure within it. Norway wasn’t a freestanding thing until Astrup’s time. For centuries, it was grafted onto Sweden and then Denmark. High culture in Oslo was resolutely Danish, down to the language, and Oslo wasn’t Copenhagen, so it was provincial. In 1905, Norway became its own country, so discovering a distinct culture and identity was the rage. Jay Clarke, once the Clark’s print curator, wrote two great essays on the woodcuts. Karl Ove Knausgard wrote an evocative, stage-setting introductory essay.

MaryAnn Stevens’s two essays, as always, are art history at its best, defining Astrup’s aesthetics and putting him in context. Frances Carey examines Astrup’s writing, which is extensive, informing his work without being blabby. He’s never telling us exactly what he’s doing. That’s in the art and, of course, in our imagination. Kesia Halvosrud did a thorough, absorbing chronology.

One of the Clark’s strengths is its French landscapes, all of which are earlier than Astrup’s but complement his work. The lineage starting with Constable, Corot, and Theodore Rousseau and leading to Monet and Sisley has many branches, among then Van Gogh but also Klimt, a brilliant landscapist, and Astrup.

In no way is Astrup derivative. Rather, he reinforces and amplifies the Impressionists in the Clark’s permanent collection. His work answers “what’s the next chapter?” — especially in his saturated, neon palette and subject matter, scenes of everyday life to him but exotic to everyone else. The Clark’s exhibition brand is twofold. It gives us a new, unexpected twist on an artist we think we know well, or it introduces us to a new artist. It does this, at its best, with the permanent collection in mind.

Unless there’s a good reason, and I can think of one, like a mid-seven-figure gift of cold, hard cash, a temporary exhibition needs to evolve from the permanent collection rather than seeming as if it comes from nowhere. I see all the Clark’s shows because I live close to Williamstown but too often leave shaking my head. Once I get beyond “Sterling Clark’s rolling in his grave,” I ask “why in the world are they doing this?”

The only quibble I have in writing about this superb exhibition is the interpretation. The labels and wall text introducing each gallery are clear and instructive, but the labels stick like glue to the painting at hand. I usually like this since I don’t like rambles, clutter, or flights of fancy, but I didn’t get the context I craved until I read the book.

Balancing “need to know” against “too much” is a challenge for gallery interpretation. Astrup is an original, but he’s not of the sun generis, sprung-from-the-head-of-Zeus kind. He comes from somewhere, and I don’t mean just Althus. He studied, briefly but with a mighty influence, in Paris as a very young man and, at the turn of the century when Paris was an avant-garde hothouse, and, in 1911, in Berlin, then itself firing on all creative cylinders. Where does he fit in the million-piece puzzle of French or German Modernism? A Cliff Notes version would make him seem less isolated or, at least, a version of Halvosrud’s chronology.

I think the Clark erred on the side of too little information rather than too much. One challenge in doing a show on this particular artist is his naivism, a strain of Symbolism that treats rural subject matter. Well-said context would save Astrup from sliding into the realm of the folksy, a high-class Grandma Moses. He’s anything but Grandma Moses, a genuine outsider artist and nostalgic. His work is dreamy, but it’s not charming, and it’s not tied at all to his persona. It might be about memory and a simple time, but it’s never baby talk.

I can’t say the show ends with a thud. In keeping with the Clark style, it dazzles with the bonfire pictures, but then Astrup rides off into the aurora borealis with nary a goodbye. Did he fall into a fjord? A pithy but evocative summation would have been nice.

Visitors to the Clark should also see the stylish, snappy show of the sculpture of Les Lalannes, the husband-and-wife team of French sculptors. Claude Lalanne died in 2019, François-Xavier in 2008, and there hasn’t been a show of their work in America in many years. I loved it.

The Lalannes are, broadly, part of the circle of avant-garde sculptors that includes Brancusi, Max Ernst, and Tinguely, by no means Dada but experimental, fun, and decorative, and I don’t mean that as an insult. François-Xavier’s sublime rhinoceros desk is there, as well as their bronze sheep series and fish sculptures. It’s Art Deco meets kitsch meets the 1970s. Some of the bigger sculptures are outdoors but visible from the gallery, which has big windows.

Of course, Sterling Clark would be rolling in his grave, and his grave is in front of the Clark so whenever he whirls, everyone hears the swoosh. He hated contemporary art, thought Picasso belonged in an insane asylum, called Dada crap, and dismissed Abstract Expressionism as the stuff of charlatans and a sign that the entire world had turned into one big insane asylum. He’d learn to love Les Lanannes, though. They’re French, as was Francine Clark, and the Lalannes’ mantra was “the supreme art was the art of living.” I can’t think of anything that better defines Sterling Clark.

I also enjoyed sitting by the Clark’s reflecting pond. Saturday was a brilliant, warm summer day, and the expansive, welcoming patio, the big pond rippling in the breeze, and the bucolic Berkshire hills were a tonic. It’s the only thing about the Clark’s pricey, fraught, peripherally useful Tadao Ando building that I like.