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Creating a Nation Through Art
Today is Norwegian National Day. It’s a day when Norwegians fill the streets, marching with flags and brass bands, and eating hot dogs. They wear traditional costume, sing and wave. In Oslo, from the balcony of the Royal Palace, the royal family wave back. Norwegian National Day celebrates the signing of the 1814 Constitution. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it gave Norway the status of an independent kingdom, handing it to a personal union under the Swedish crown.
The Scandinavian nations have produced a cultural output entirely disproportionate to their populations. For Denmark, it’s their contribution to world literature. For Sweden, it’s music. And if Norway has overproduced, it’s through art. Every year, thousands of tourists arrive in Oslo to visit Edvard Munch’s Scream (Skrik). It’s northern Europe’s Mona Lisa, sitting still amidst a crowd of selfie snappers. But The Scream is certainly not where Norway’s artistic power stops. For, just as ABBA created the Swedish music scene, Munch inspired Norwegian art to reproduce.
When Norway achieved full independence in 1905, importing its own monarch, years of foreign rule had crushed its ancient, Viking-rooted identity. The new nation was forced to search for its own, entirely new personality. Ivar Aasen built a new written language. Edvard Grieg created a ‘national musical language’. Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson created a ‘national literary language’. And, in art, a ‘national visual language’ was founded by two artists: Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928) and Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935). Astrup and Sohlberg strove to rediscover a lost folkloric tradition, painting images of an idealised lifestyle: pastoral, cultivated and self-adjusted. It’s no coincidence that Sohlberg’s 1914 painting Winter Night in the Mountains (Vinternatt i Rondane) was proclaimed Norway’s ‘national painting’ in a 1995 poll, fending off The Scream.
“Edvard Grieg created a ‘national musical language’. Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson created a ‘national literary language’. And, in art, a ‘national visual language’ was founded by two artists: Nikolai Astrup and Harald Sohlberg.”
Both Astrup and Sohlberg began their studies at what was then Norway’s only art school, an entirely inadequate institution in Oslo. Astrup swapped Oslo for Paris, Sohlberg for Copenhagen. But rather than losing touch with Norway, studying abroad was vital for both artists’ appreciation of their homeland. Though they adopted foreign influences, it was abroad that Astrup and Sohlberg embraced the ideas of the ‘Romantic Nationalists’. This group had dominated Norwegian art for years. The artists were members of the ‘Lysaker Circle’, a group founded to portray Norwegian landscape in a proud – if frightening – light. Andrew Graham-Dixon, in his BBC Four series Art of Scandinavia, describes how, in Romantic Nationalist works, “storms rage and seas churn under skies without memory of morning or hope of night.”
The movement was outdated. But it provided a surrogate to visualise Norse mythology. Folktales were an idiom the whole population could understand. It was something they could relate and identify with. As Tove Kårstad Haugsbø, (Curator at KODE, Bergen) told me a few years back during a visit, it was an essential tool in bringing the population into the new cultural movement. Astrup’s c.1920 painting March Morning (Marsmorgen) anthropomorphises a tree, while both artists turned mountains to the faces of trolls.
“Elin Melberg is just one artist inspired by the work of Astrup and Sohlberg. Marianne Aulie, too, heightens Sohlberg’s expression with her performance art, exploring neo-expressionist, action paint.”
Norway’s cultural identity swung to literature in the second half of the twentieth century, with the likes of Jo Nesbø, Karl Ove Knausgård and Karin Fossum reporting the oil boom and slotting into ‘Nordic noir’. Its musical talent, after the Millennium, made a name for itself: Sigrid, Aurora and Ane Brun. Typically Norwegian, this talent is typically reserved. It’s the same for modern artistic talent. Elin Melberg is just one artist inspired by the work of Astrup and Sohlberg. Her mosaics follow the same meditative, detailed process, where sense of place is paramount. Marianne Aulie, too, heightens Sohlberg’s expression with her performance art, exploring neo-expressionist, action paint. Unlike the others, she’s not afraid to be flashy. On one opening night alone, at a gallery in New York, she made over $442,000. Like Astrup and Sohlberg, Aulie sees faces in objects and the landscape. Her trademark series Triumph of the Optimist features creatures she describes as “beings who want good”.
Speaking to me last October, Graham-Dixon explained that in the late nineteenth century, hardly anyone in Norway had the resources to be an artist. Once Munch achieved it, it gave others a sense of mission. Visiting Astrup’s home in 2016, determination was certainly the impression I got. I was met by Ane Dale Erikstad, who showed me the precariousness of his dwellings. Astrup was born in Bremanger, but moved to Ålhus (Jølster), when he was three. Sandalstrand (now renamed Astruptunet) was his farmstead and lifelong project. It was his studio, his source of food and a purpose-built expression of self-sufficiency in a challenging landscape. Sandalstrand reflected Astrup’s individuality and perseverance, but also Norway’s. Industrialisation had scarcely reached it, and with the factories of Malmö and Gothenburg snatched away on independence, it was a nation searching both an economic and cultural purpose. The economic purpose came after the Second World War, when oil was struck. The cultural purpose came early.
So, as we celebrate the 207th Norwegian National Day, it’s no exaggeration to say that Astrup and Sohlberg created a nation through art!
