Wild, strange and abruptly beautiful, the paintings of Nikolai Astrup carry you to Norway in an instant. The opening gallery at Dulwich plunges the viewer straight into icy fjords and towering skies, meadows starred with marigolds and buttercups, pine-dark forests, glassy reflections in still lakes and the midnight sun hanging above white clapboard churches. But these are not just transcriptions, they are visions of a land ringing with mystery. Astrup is electrified by what he sees, and his paintings, pulsing with peculiar rhythms, pass close to the mystic.
He lived all his life in a corner of south-west Norway where the winters are fierce and the summer nights glow indigo and purple. It is a land physically felt and endured in his art, from the sharp burn of icy air on the face to the quickening mudslide down a hill in heavy rain. People lean over gates to catch the first scent of summer, dine outdoors in the orchard and retreat inside when snow buries the fields, reflecting an eerie light in the sky.
In one painting, snow on the mountain seems to take on the shape of limber-moving animals. In another, a woman in a headscarf carries a bucket of smoking fire towards a stream, its source like the face of a wintry old man. According to local folklore, spring comes when fire warms the earth. The woman is a force of nature.
Astrup is not a name on many people’s lips, even in Scandinavia. This is not just the first British show since his death in 1928, it is the first outside Norway. His compatriot Edvard Munch casts such a long shadow over Norwegian painting as to eclipse the much less histrionic Astrup, although there are moments at Dulwich where the morphology of rocks, stones and whorled skies may seem to be shared.
But what distinguishes Astrup is his spirit and verve. He doesn’t see fear in the landscape so much as energy. The son of a dour Lutheran pastor, he was a sickly child (a character fit for Munch, in fact) who saw the world framed through the windows of the wooden parsonage. But it didn’t turn him into a miserabilist. His paintings have the slightly hallucinatory air of convalescence, each section of the view given its own special love.
A quartet of landscapes show the same field beneath a changing sky, shifting through cerulean, turquoise and blazing cobalt as the seasons pass. Night falls, and the field glows velvety black. The hill across the local lake is a spring-green heap, and then a mound of frozen rock in a stillness broken only by a lone boat, a lone bird, a ripple in the royal blue waters; to describe his art as evocative would be true, but an understatement. Something took hold of Astrup as a child and never left him: a gripped excitement before the Norwegian landscape.
In 1914, Astrup bought a small patch of it for his family. Sepia photographs of Astruptunet, as it is now known, show a bleak hill dotted with log cabins. When the painter moved there with his wife and young child – the first of eight – they had to clamber up the sheer peak on their hands and knees in snow. They cultivated the hard land, and Astrup eventually built a rickety studio before his death of pneumonia at the age of 47. He had few patrons and precious little money. You could make quite a hero out of him.
Astrup’s painted celebrations of his homestead are jubilant. One view shows a tilled field striped lavender, turquoise and mauve, and the figures of his wife and children, gazing at this spectacle, haloed in brilliant sunlight. He transformed the image into a sequence of prints in variously beautiful hues that have their culmination in a stark black and white series, the shapes and forms seeming to shiver with ecstatic light.
This light is so often, paradoxically, that of darkness. Skies glower and the atmosphere surges with fog; in winter the waterfalls sparkle down the black mountains in sudden shafts of cold light and there is a gorgeous heaviness to these fir-dense hills. “Memory, landscape, everyday activity imbued with mysticism,” wrote Astrup of his endeavour to find a “national visual language”. Not for nothing is he compared to Grieg.
But what’s remarkable is that this fervent Norwegian visited Paris in 1902 and looked hard at the Japanese prints so beloved of the Impressionists. Astrup stares at Hiroshige, and returns with the idea of an exquisitely flattened hymn of praise to the crescent moon over the Norwegian lakes and – stranger still – turns the local hill into a Fuji over the fjords.
Not all of his printmaking succeeds. Any veering towards the symbolic can be hard to take, as when he wrenches a willow into a wailing female form, fingers imploringly outstretched to the heavens, or when corn stooks resemble trolls. A series of prints of spotted foxgloves against silver birches would have been startling (early op art almost) had Astrup not introduced some kitsch little red-dressed girls.
The closer to folklore, the worse it gets; Astrup is at his best when he is not making it up. When the sky scuds, when spring bursts, when summer blazes into life. The climax of this show is the room of midsummer’s eve bonfires at the very end – orange fireballs reflected in the purple lake, flames leaping and releasing like dragons in the dark-blue air, free and intoxicating canvases.
Detached from the crowds of dancing revellers is a small figure, silhouetted black against the flames. It might stand for Nikolai Astrup himself. For his art transcends ego; devoted to this place and these people, he made his paintings for them.
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