True North

Imagine seeing all the very best Nordic landscape paintings from national galleries and private collections across Scandinavia—in an afternoon. That’s the promise and the premise of A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting, 1840–1910, which opens later this month at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the show’s only U.S. stop.

The exhibition features 115 paintings by sixty-five artists, ranging from recognizable names such as Edvard Munch and Harald Sohlberg to the obscure and surprising—yes, Arthur Strindberg was a painter too. The landscapes range from realistic and recognizable to the evocative and symbolist. “It covers a period very rarely looked at, right up to the edge of abstraction,” says curator-in-charge Patrick Noon, who calls the collection “iconic.”

“It’s going to be a revelation for an American audience,” Noon predicts. Literally. The show is the first to focus on this period of Nordic landscape painting, and it’s one of the few to focus on Nordic painting at all. The last major show of Scandinavian art in the United States, which also showed at the institute, was more than twenty years ago.

Organized around five themes that parallel developments in landscape painting over a seventy-year period, the most obvious common thread may be the attempts to capture the quality of the light. “It creates a mood in itself,” Noon notes. The northern twilight, the clear crystalline blue of a Scandinavian summer, the brooding wintery horizon, each is illuminated by that northern light, each is a distilled essence of northern landscape.

A Mirror of Nature starts with the rise of nationalism reflected in the heroic depictions of nature in the mid-nineteenth century. Norwegian painter Peder Balke’s The Jostedal Glacier—a towering natural (and national) monument enshrouded in mist and myth—provides a prime example of this highly realistic style. Eilif Peterssen’s Summer Night, as well as works by Kitty Kielland and Christian Skredsvig, departs from strict realism on the way to the more inward-looking landscapes of Edvard Munch and Lars Hertervig from the early twentieth century. It’s a mini-lesson in European intellectual and social history in the form of flower-covered fields and and pristine lakes. Opens June 24. 2400 3rd Ave. S., Mpls., 612-870-3131