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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