Magnetic north

‘Edvard Munch, I cannot abide,’ wrote Nikolai Astrup in a letter to his friend Arne Giverholt. ‘Everything that he does is supposed to be so brilliant that it doesn’t have to be more than merely sketched.’

Near contemporaries, Munch and Astrup were both innovative and admired painters but while Munch is today one of the few household-name artists, thanks to one misunderstood and overrated painting, Astrup has been neglected by everyone outside Norway. Happily, this is a travesty soon to be rectified by Dulwich Picture Gallery, which next month stages the first major exhibition of Astrup’s work to be held in Britain.

Unlike many other Norwegian painters, Munch included, Astrup did not abandon his native land to make a career further south. A pastor’s son from Ålhus in the Jølster district of western Norway, Astrup left his region only briefly to study and travel. He saw Oslo (then known as Kristiania), Paris and London but found all the motifs that would define his work in Jølster. The paintings and woodcuts he produced there form one of the most comprehensive portraits of any landscape ever made. They are also among the strangest.

Astrup’s work was about more than the mere shape of hills, arrangement of farm buildings or play of light on the surface of the lake. These things he painted with a singular intensity of colour and an absolute mastery of the limpid northern light, but he also succeeded in representing the complex and ancient human relationship with the land. The layers of folklore and paganism that seeped through the cracks in the nominally Christian community preached to by his father were never far away in Astrup’s world.