Astrup repeatedly painted taciturn views of the parsonage in which he grew up, as if it possessed some unresolved import. He was the first of fourteen children of a pietistic Lutheran pastor who opposed his vocation in art. But I sense a mental pressure in Astrup’s work as a whole: there’s something personal that he had to deal with or kept trying to get at, bearing on obsessive memories of his childhood. Knausgaard asserts that the pictures are “devoid of psychology,” and, in comparison with Munch’s illustrative poetics, that’s certainly the case.

There’s an intensity about his process that’s hard to explain. Now, what about the art? Can it be pried from an understandably fond communal embrace?Īstrup painted thickly, with details atop generalized forms. His fame can seem captive to a sentimental nationalism, which the Clark show, subtitled “Visions of Norway,” exacerbates with photographic murals of Jølster that suggest a walk-through travel brochure. For Norwegians, Astrup’s appeal was and remains something like patriotic. In a “prelude” to the show’s catalogue, the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard recalls one in his childhood home. It seems that many houses in Norway display reproductions of his art somewhere on their walls. He could effectively start from scratch even when repeating such motifs as that of a mountain viewed across a lake: his Nordic Mont Sainte-Victoire. Restlessly inventive, often varying his manner from picture to picture, he is like no one else. Afterward, he promptly returned to the mountainous municipality of Jølster, and stayed there. How could that happen?Īstrup was a naturalist, influenced by modernist movements including Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, thanks to his early training-with help from a patron’s grant-in Paris and Germany.

I learned that Astrup is, arguably, the most popular artist in Norway-ahead of Munch, who, I’ve been told, makes schoolchildren sad-while largely unknown beyond its borders. A receding row of grain poles could be a sinister parade of trolls, and the shape of a pollarded tree in winter evokes a writhing, unhappy supernatural being. (There’s a farming community called Skjeldal.) An enchanting Astrup exhibition at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, startled me with densely composed, brilliantly colored paintings and wizardly woodcuts, mostly landscapes of mountains, forests, bodies of water, humble farm buildings, and gardens (among other things, the artist was a passionate amateur horticulturalist), with occasional inklings of mysticism relating to native folklore. Astrup is new to me-and I’m of Norwegian descent, with ancestral roots in much the same rugged, sparsely populated, preposterously scenic western region of the country where Astrup, who was born in 1880, spent nearly his entire life. Have you ever heard of a Norwegian artist named Nikolai Astrup, a younger contemporary of Edvard Munch? If so, you’re either a rare bird or Norwegian.

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