Three Painters: Evola, Crowley, Schuon

There are serious painters – artists – and then there are dabblers, those who paint as an aside to their major occupation, and it is often the dabblers who are more interesting than the bona fide artists. A previous posting to these pages (see here) concerned the watercolours of three notable amateurs, Prince Charles, Winston Churchill and Chancellor Herr Hitler. The present posting follows much the same format, but we will be contrasting the paintings of three purported spiritual luminaries: Baron Julius Evola, hero of Right-wing perennialism, Frithjof Schuon, touted by his followers as the ‘Messenger of the Religio Perennis’, and the English occultist Aleister Crowley, the self-declared ‘Master Therion’, Prophet of the Aeon of Horus. All three of these characters - men of spiritual pretensions - took to the canvas at certain junctures in their lives, and as well as the writings for which they are better known left behind a legacy of visual art. Largely, such works are of concern only to devotees, but all three conducted official exhibitions during their lifetime and in all three cases their work continues to be exhibited and can command healthy prices whenever they go to market. They are assuredly very different thinkers, and accordingly very different artists, as we shall see:

* * *

BARON JULIUS EVOLA

In his misspent youth, before he had discovered the writings of Rene Guenon and realized his vocation as a spokesman for political perennialism, Baron Evola dabbled in Dada. In fact, he was a major force in bringing the Dada avante guard to Italy in the 1920s. He exhibited in Rome and caused a stir with his brash radicalism. His paintings, however, now appear to be quite ordinary examples of Dadist abstraction, though here and there we find hints of symbols and motifs that foreshadow the esoteric interests to which the Baron later devoted himself with distinction. 

In truth, though, many of his paintings are beneath ordinary and fall into the category of horrible. It is only die-hard Evola enthusiasts who find much in them that is redeeming. The present author, in any case, only likes one or two – indicated below – even though he is a reader of Evola’s writings and has a high regard for them. Indeed, Baron Evola’s books and essays become more prescient and relevant every day; they are worthy of every attention. But the paintings? No. And the Baron recognized this himself and, to his credit, later dismissed Dada as decadence. His paintings, unfortunately, are ill-matched to his written ouevre. He dabbled in poetry as well - equally undistinguished. 

Senza titolo 1921

Composition No. 3.

Paesaggio interiore

For whatever reason, this is the Evola painting that takes the present author's fancy. Colour, composition, intensity. It is not entirely successful, but it is, all the same, almost musical. 

Nudo di donna (afroditica) - a painting with no redeeming qualities at all!

La libra s’infiamma e le piramidi

In this work we see the appearance of the alchemical symbol for sulphur. The painting itself has no great qualities. It is a completely undistinguished attempt at Dada abstraction. But it was in this period that Baron Evola began delving into esoteric symbolism. Thankfully, he turned away from painting and embraced esotericism instead. 

A Bunch of Flowers, 1918. There is, perhaps, something to be said for this composition. Lyricism, like Kandinsky. 

Paesaggio interire, aperture del diaframma 

(“Interior landscape, the opening of the diaphragm”

“Piccola tavola (vista superiore)” (“Small table (upper surface)”) 1920

Dadist composition (1920s)

There is perhaps something to be said for this composition as well. 

Portrait cubiste de femme, 1919-20

This is a genuinely horrid painting. Many of Evola's paintings are bland or contrived but some, such as this, are manifestly ugly. 

Abstraction

The Generator of the Universe. (What can one say about this? It is hard to believe that any follower of Rene Guenon could ever have painted such a thing!)

* * * 

ALEISTER CROWLEY

Numerous posts to these pages feature or make mention of Mr Crowley, often in unflattering terms. The present author is clearly not a Thelemite (follower of Crowley’s ‘Law of Thelema’) and in fact has a suitable disdain for every effort Mr Crowley made to concoct a religion around himself. His so-called ‘Book of the Law’ is bunk and his creed of ‘Do what thou wilt’ is libertarian nonsense dressed up as ancient Egyptian profundity. Moreover, Crowley – diametrically contrary to his own inflated regard for himself - must rate as one of the worst poets in the English language. W. B. Yeats – one of the best – once quipped that Crowley had managed to write maybe three or four lines of decent verse. This is to be generous. Although, he was a very fine – and always entertaining – prose writer and his edifice of occultism can be seen as a remarkable creative endeavour in toto. He also turned his hand to painting, adopting a sort of expressionist style. Examples can be seen below. And, in fact, they are rather good. Of recent times they have attracted the attention of the art cognoscenti, and rightly so for they are quirky, mysterious, potent, raw, amongst other qualities. They illustrate the strength and power of Mr Crowley’s personality and his unique, though always dark, vision. 

Landscape with Coral & Jade Pagodas. One of Crowley's better paintings. 

May Morning. A typically macabre theme. Crowley wrote: "The painting represents the dawning of the day following a witches' celebration as described in Faust. The witch is hanged, as she deserves, and the satyr looks out from behind a tree."

The moon, study for the tarot. It is a great pity that Crowley did not complete a set of images for tarot designs. He later employed the services of Lady Freda Harris and instructed her to design his tarot cards, subsequently published as the 'Thoth' deck. Although Lady Harris' designs are widely admired, the present author finds them typical of a type of turgid modernism that is not to his taste. Crowley's own tarot paintings are somewhat more interesting and would have revealed much more of his magickal personality. 

Van Gogh-like expressionism. Despite being derivative, it is nonetheless a potent painting, a vision driven by the overtly phallic-solar cultus that Mr Crowley constructed around himself.

Self-Portrait. Like most self-depictions, this flatters him. He was actually a flabby Englishman wiuth beady eyes and a whiney high-pitched voice - here depicted as a phallic-headed hero from another dimension. 

Ladies of the Liberal Club

Crowley's vicious satires of middle-class respectability are always entertaining and incisive. (Read, for example, his short work entitled 'How to Fake Horoscopes'). He shows a piercing ability to stare into the empty pit of blank souls. In that respect, there is something to be said for this portrait of 'Ladies of the Liberal Club'. Such ladies populate liberal clubs to this day! 

The BABALON door. Many of Crowley's paintings remain on the doors and walls at his so-called 'Abbey of Thelema' in Cefalu, Sicily, which is today dilapidated and ramshackle. It is a pity - and quite remarkable - that no great effort has been made to preserve these works. 

* * * 

FRITHJOF SCHUON

The Swiss-French Soofi religionist Monsieur Schuon was a trained fabric designer by profession, and so he brought a degree of artistic expertise to his painting lacking in the case of the two other completely amateur artists considered above. His work is more polished and technically competent, but also far less revealing for all of that. It is steady and controlled, iconographic rather than expressive. Schuon relocated to Bloomington Indiana in the 1980s to take up residence as pontificating guru to a community of well-to-do Americans. But he had always felt a strong affinity for the American native traditions, and the relocation brought him into contact with representatives of the Plains Indians. This becomes the central preoccupation of his paintings, with a particular emphasis on naked Indian girls rationalized as a metaphysical concern for the ‘Divine Feminine’. 

Schuon penchant for nudism led him into morally dangerous terrain, however, and he was, late in the piece, investigated for inappropriate dealings with minors. All charges were dismissed, but critics maintain that his well-to-do clientele used their wealth to rescue him from legal proceedings. There are, even so, photographs circulating privately on the Internet – always subject to legal threats by the same wealthy followers – of Monsieur Schuon and his various wives (vertical and horizontal) involved in some odd naked antics which suggest at very least that things became quite strange down there in Bloomington towards the end of his life. There is a stolid dignity in his paintings – a quality the present author admires – although it must be admitted that it is, all up, just a passable imitation of Gaugin (who also had a thing for the exotic flesh of native girls.) Some of the more explicit paintings of Schuon, which the present author has seen, and which betray a somewhat lurid eye are not easily found on the Internet (again because his followers keep a very tight control upon his legacy.) He is, finally, a painter of quasi-Amer-Indian icons with New Age appeal. 

It is surprising that there is so little Mohammadan content in his work, but it underlines the fact that, once in Bloomington, the interests of the self-initiated ‘Sheihk Jesus’ shifted increasingly to a neo-paganism of his own invention, complete with quasi-Indian rituals and pow-wows, and drifted further and further from any mainstream version of Soofism. The present author has been a reader of Schuon's works, and values them in many respects, and admires many of his paintings too. Like Evola and Crowley as well, Schuon fancied himself as a poet. Like them, his poems are terrible. 

The flatness and above all the silence of these works - well-rendered, it must be said - is strongly reminiscent of the works of Gaugin (with both artists showing a strong philosophical debt to Rousseau's "noble savage" ideology.)

Although not obvious in this work, Schuon's depictions of the horned elk are conceived as types of self-portraits. He took the elk as a "totem" in the Indian manner and the proud male elk guarding the females and young of the herd was Schuon's fantasy of his role as leader of his followers in Bloomington. There is a series of such works with this sub-text. 

Laylat al-Qadr. The Night of Power. One of the few overtly Mohammadan paintings in the oeuvre of Monsieur Schuon. He spent time in the company of Soofis in North Africa and through those associations later promoted himself as "Shayk Isa (Jesus)", although his credentials and claims to a genuine Soofi lineage are widely disputed. 

The Virgin Mary meets Pocahontas - a quintessentially Schuonian conflation. 

Schuon was a lover of the feminine, and should not be faulted for that. His depictions of the female form show great insight into feminine archetypes and the contemplative nature of female beauty. This, more than the "noble savage" theme, is one of the strongest recommendations for Schuon's paintings in the opinion of the present writer. 

* * * 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Happy Kingdom of Siam

According to certain reports in the international media in recent times, the poor people of the Kingdom of Siam – occasionally called ‘Thailand’ – are “suffering” for the lack of democracy. The present author, who has now been travelling through this same Kingdom for over a month, however, must report to the contrary. The overwhelming impression one has of the country and its people is that it is generally prosperous, well-ordered and, on the whole, happy. The only sign of discontent the author has encountered has been an old Siamese gentleman standing at the traffic lights complaining about the proliferation of automobiles and pining for the old days of rickshaws and horse-drawn carts. Otherwise, the people of Siam are unusually peaceful and cheerful in their demeanor. This cannot be universally true, but it is all the same an accurate generalization as any number of the tourists who flock there every year can confirm. Suffering? Hardly. There is some poverty to be seen, especially in rural pockets, but no destitute beggars on the streets such as one finds in many other places, and the general reception one receives from people across the whole spectrum of Siamese society is warm, generous and friendly. You would expect a “suffering” people to be dour, surly, bitter. There is nothing of that.

Some people attribute the warm and felicitous disposition of the Siamese to Boodhism, for the Kingdom of Siam is officially Boodhist with some ninety percent of the population subscribing to the Theravadan mode of Boodhist thought. An acquaintance of the author opines that a long heritage of Theravadan Boodhism has made the Siamese “soft” and “gentle” in their manner. This is possibly so. There is a Boodhist ambiance and wats – temples – in every town. Perhaps it has contributed to the national temperament, and if so it is to be commended for that. But there are surely other factors too, some of which are evident to even a casual visitor and which become more obvious once one knows something of the history and deeper culture of the land. No doubt the Boodhism contributes to the strong sense of social cohesion in Siam, but so too, for certain, does the strength and endurance of the nation’s monarchy. If there are Boodhist temples in every town, there are portraits of the king, and of the royal family, everywhere as well. Every café, every school, every public building, but also every home, is adorned with pictures of the king, King Bhumibol, (his full title is Phra Bat Somdet Phra Paraminthra Maha Bhumibol Adulyadej Mahitalathibet Ramathibodi Chakkrinaruebodin Sayamminthrathirat Borommanatthabophit) who is not only respected but genuinely loved by his people. This is a very strong and healthy monarchy. It is a striking feature of the nation, especially for those of us who come from countries where monarchies have degenerated into mere parodies of what they once were and where, in fact, the very notion of monarchy is treated as an anachronistic embarrassment by the intellectual elites. The Kingdom of Siam, the Boodhist Kingdom of Siam, remains a viable monarchy and the people of the nation are united in their love for the king and the institution of the monarchy. The nation was ruled by absolute monarchs for many centuries. This changed to constitutional monarchy in the early XXth century, but the monarchy has remained strong, an emblem of tradition and continuity.

The practical effect of the monarchy is, as this author has witnessed everywhere he has gone thus far, to bind the people into a single kinship. It is instructive to see a real monarchy in operation. It gives to a society a locus of veneration, but more importantly it universalizes the value of family. For monarchy, finally, is about family. Other societies might be conceived to be social contracts, or be modeled on corporations, or – worse still – be understood to be types of machines (the State as machine, the model of the technocrat), but a monarchy, in theory and practice, concerns the State as family. Monarchy is about kinship. It is not necessarily racial or ethically static – since people from outside can marry into family – but even then citizens are bound into a single family structure at the head of which is the king (and by extension the queen, princes, princesses and the wider royal family and aristocracy.) This is what gives the Kingdom of Siam such a strong sense of social cohesion. The present author is invited into Siamese homes. There, on the wall, invariably, are pictures of the homeowner’s family, their mother and father, and ancestors, and children, but among them – or usually over them – is a picture of the king. He is regarded as the head of the greater family. He is like everybody’s great-grandfather. He is woven into every family structure. Reverence for him is as sincere as reverence for one’s family elders. There can be no question that this permeates Siamese society with such values as respect, dignity, mutuality and makes the Siamese into a people bound not so much by a pompous, confected nationalism such as one finds in modern republics, but by a living, genuine, concrete sense of family unity. The fact that there might be miscreants, criminals and malcontents in Siamese society, as everywhere, does not undermine the more considerable fact of a palpable social cohesion and common purpose. It is a happy kingdom, a place where – contrary to all the cynicism and selfish bitterness typical of Westerners – we can see the real virtues of monarchy still alive and functioning today.

But, but, but… stammer the leftist liberals and so-called ‘democracy activists’ and ‘human rights advocates’. The only ‘but’ is that the Kingdom of Siam does not conform to the narrow expectations of Western elites. People can be charged and jailed for the crime of lese majeste – speaking ill of the king. Is this not an outrage against the god of “free speech”? And, in fact, the country is administered by the army and a National Council of Peace and Order, with the king as a figurehead with merely residual powers. Is this not an affront to ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’? This is where some will claim that the people of the nation are “suffering”. The truth, though, is that they are not, and that – inconceivable as it may seem to Western liberals, left and right – the country is well-run, peaceful, prosperous and orderly even though it is not a liberal democracy. 

The history is instructive. In the 1920s Western-educated intellectuals agitated for “modern democracy” and ended centuries of absolute monarchy. But then, almost immediately, the unity of the nation was shattered and it fell into civil turmoil since “democracy” is, after all, a type of ritualized civil war between contending interests, specifically capital and labour. The country fell apart. At this, the army – the one remaining stable institution, along with the monarchy – stepped in to restore order. And so it has been ever since. Western-educated intellectuals, and their Western backers, agitate for “democracy”. Then the cohesion of the country is broken. Then the army – on behalf of the king - saves it from self-destruction. The demonstrable fact is that it is a nation that functions very well, and enjoys prosperity and peace, under the monarchy, but which quickly falls into disarray under the artificial, imported structures of “democracy”. It seems clear that most Siamese are perfectly happy to be living under the benign care of the National Council and the watchful paternalism of the king. It is only a small, spoilt, vicious, Westernized, urban elite that thinks that “democracy” is the gold standard in constitutions. In this respect, Siam bears the fruit of never having been a European colony. The Kings of Siam were always too canny for the European colonial powers. And consequently, the intellectual life of the nation was never infected with the lasting poison of an anti-colonial independence movement such as one finds in, say, India, which insists on “democracy” as the measure of self-government. There is a destructive pro-democracy movement in Siam, to be sure, but it is not a systemic toxin for all of that. 

* * * 

For the present author, these points are of particular interest given his long-held affinity to the philosophy of Plato, which philosophy is, of course, essentially political in nature. Plato is a political philosopher first and foremost. And the good Kingdom of Siam invites several meditations upon Platonic political themes. Most famously, Plato wrote an account of a supposedly ideal state, the Republic, but there is also the dialogue called the Laws, and that called the First Alchibiades, and many others, which bear upon directly political questions. Socrates, wisest and most just, let us recall, was put to death by the Athenian democracy. So the Socratic Plato was no democrat. Indeed, he is the most comprehensive and deepest critic of the democratic system and democratic theory. In a place such as the Kingdom of Siam we can see stark illustrations of his critique, as well as at least bare outlines of the sort of alternatives he proposed based on his analysis of polities. Make no mistake, it is not an “ideal state”, and no one is suggesting so, but neither is it a tyranny under which its people are “suffering” just for a lack of popular elections. Pornography, narcotics and gambling are all illegal, but it is hardly a joyless, puritanical place, as, again, its booming tourist industry attests. The streets are clean, the beer is cheap, the children are polite, the women are petite, the food vendors are full of smiles – not, your average “military dictatorship”. The assumption that liberal democracy is the only possible mode of government under which a people can be content is one of the most infantile falsehoods of our time. Siam is not a democracy but it is assuredly a well-governed state.

Plato’s political theories are complex to say the least and they overlap at every juncture with his metaphysics, psychology and much more, but central to them is the observation that there are three fundamental groupings of forces in both a state and a man: the ‘appetitive’, the ‘emotive’ or 'spiritedness' (thumos) and the ‘rational’ (nous). These may be observed in any society, but specifically the appetitive classes are those concerned with production and consumption, the ‘spirited’ class with the heroic impulse, and so with war and defense, and the rational with contemplation, guidance, rulership. In a modern democracy society is ruled by the appetitive classes, producers and consumers, capital or labour, who compete in elections for the right to govern. This is, as we said above, a type of ritualized civil war which, at best, is prevented from destroying civil society with open conflict by a system of agreed but always precarious checks and balances. It is a fragile thing, as Plato knew, and its weaknesses eventually erode civil purpose and lead to chaos. This is what happened in Siam in the 1920s, and then again with regularity in the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s and so on.

The state of chaos in a degenerative democracy is then an invitation to tyranny. Typically, some strong man from one or other of the warring forces takes control. The modern era is so replete with examples of this terrible outcome we need not list them. Representatives of business – Chile’s Pinochet – or else labour – Castro’s Cuba – seize power and oppress their rivals. Democracy degenerates into class war, and then into dictatorship, left or right. Plato forsees this, and earnestly seeks to avoid it. His politics is not predicated upon a class-war model. He is, above all, confident that the conflicting interests in a polity can be harmonized and that a harmonious unity can be achieved where each of its parts can flourish without it being at the expense of others. But this can only be done by empowering the higher faculties and those that embody them. A rational and virtuous order can be attained, and labour and capital can be restrained from destroying each other, by directing a society towards a higher unity and a common good.

In the Republic – admittedly a theoretical ideal and not a programme for action - this takes the form of a class of reluctant ‘Guardians’ who must surrender their own liberties in order to rule in wisdom and righteousness for the sake of all. At best it is a type of philosophical theocracy. It is rarely to be seen, Socrates says, and more commonly it takes the form of some type of aristocracy, and indeed in practical terms Platonic politics is essentially aristocratic. Thus do Platonists look well upon most manifestations of monarchy, because at very least a monarchy – and its aristocracy – entails a class of people who are trained and dedicated and raised to the task of ruling from birth, and though they may live in an atmosphere of opulence and fine taste (contrary to the more austere Platonic ideal), they are removed from the grubby intrigues of commerce (they are aristocrats, not tycoons!) and live under the quite severe restraints of custom and tradition and duty.

What we see in the Kingdom of Siam is the second order – the ‘emotive’ 'spirited' class, which is to say the army, whose primary virtue is valor and courage – taking control in order to prevent the warring appetitive classes from wrecking the fabric of the nation. But, happily, instead of some army general taking control and appointing himself tyrant – as we saw in, say, Idi Amin, or Colonel Gadaffi, or Sadam Hussein, any number of them! – the junta in this case took a far more Platonic strategy. They were able to do so by drawing upon the continued strength of the age-old monarchy. Certainly, His Highness King Bhumibol, like any modern king, is not the Philosopher-King of Plato’s Republic, but he is a refined man of wide education, virtuous, benevolent and not without wisdom. Moreover, he is a religious figure: the monarchy is thoroughly integrated into the Boodhist tradition of the land. His image stands beside Boodhas, monks, perfected Arhats and holy men in every temple throughout the nation. He is a pious man of transcendent sensibility. In our age it is probably as much as one can hope for.

The whole problem of Platonic politics, let us state plainly, is to find some virtuous authority that is above and beyond the murderous, envy-driven scumbag working class, firstly, and the devious, corrupt, greed-driven and parasitic business class as well, two groups of the appetitive temperament always seeking to tear each other apart; an authority that will allow these two parties to go about their proper purpose unimpeded and that will govern not in the interests or this or that sectional group but in the common good, guided by higher ideals. In the case of Siam, this role has been taken by the National Council for Peace and Order, guardians of the common good on behalf and with the tacit support of His Highness the king. It is not, by any means, an ideal Platonic arrangement, but it is understandable in the framework of Platonic political theory. The army – royalists and patriots – have saved the country from civil war again and again, and have prevented the advent of both degenerative democracy and the inevitable tyranny that is its eventual outcome. Those who clamber for democracy – let us also be clear – are driven by ideological delusions or else by the urge to seize power through the manipulation of the popular will in order to further not the national interest but their own sectional self-interests (dressed up, as usual, as "rights"). That is always the way in democracies, with very rare and brief exceptions. The Kingdom of Siam is an object lesson in these political processes, exactly as described in the dialogues of Plato. 

Long live the King!

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Themes in Nikolai Astrup

“At last, Nikolai Astrup is getting the recognition he deserves!” This was the attitude widely promulgated among the art fraternity when the work of the early XXth century Norwegian painter was shown in London for the first time not long ago. What they meant, of course, was that – at last – the Norwegian master, always acclaimed in his native land and revered by Norwegian nationalists but shamefully ignored everywhere else, was being recognized by important Guardian-reading cosmopolitan sophisticates like themselves. Is there any more loathsome, unctuous group of self-regarding parasites than the modern art establishment? When they “discover” an artist – whom they had previously neglected - it is like the artist is suddenly blessed with amazing good fortune. This is now the fate of poor Astrup. Namedroppers are suddenly dropping his name at every exhibition opening from London to Berlin. This is after nearly a century of him remaining blissfully to one side of mainstream European art, a well-kept secret among discerning outsiders.

What Astrup has always remained outside of is the puerile art orthodoxy that elevated and celebrated the neurotic modernist decadence of Astrup’s fellow Norwegian, Edvard Munch. Astrup despised Munch. The two artists – contemporaries – could hardly have had more opposing interests. Munch was a representative of dreary, expressionist, urban existential angst. Astrup, rather, was a rural conservative, religious, a farmer, a father of eight children to a child bride, an artist on a quest for an authentic, luminous visual language for his nation and his folk heritage. Munch became a modernist icon. Astrup was loved by his countrymen but dismissed as “neo-romantic” beyond Norway’s borders, and as far as the European establishment was concerned he sank into oblivion. They have belatedly “found” him again, and now he is all the rage. “You don’t know Astrup? Oh, please!”

His “discovery” is, all the same, timely. It comes as a new nationalist consciousness is returning to Europe after cracks – or yawning chasms – have appeared in the European Union’s Marxist multicultural project. Faced with the disintegration of their distinctive cultures into an egalitarian sludge, Europeans are reawakening to the value of identity, tradition and heritage. In this context, an artist such as Astrup comes into his own. His work embodies the values of the New Right: family, soil, work, kinship, nation, blood, beauty, cosmic integrity, the mystique and communion of ancient custom. Let us witness some examples:

The primary traditional value celebrated in the works of Astrup is location. Other than a few brief trips abroad, he spent the whole of his short life living on a farm on the shores of a Norwegian lake (Jølstravatnet) and the farm itself, the lake, mountains and scenery thereabouts, along with his family, form almost the entire subject matter of his art. It is an art of rootedness and locale. The picture, above, is the farm where he lived with his wife and eight children. (Note the cold frames in the garden.) 

He often painted the same scene from exactly the same view at different times of the year or day. Again: location. And the cyclic passage of time. The cycle of the year. One of the main concerns of his work is the integration of traditional man with the cosmos. Traditional man is rooted in location, but also in the cycles of time. Modern, decadent man - celebrated in the endorsed modernist art of Munch and co - is essentially non-geographical and a-temporal, a celebration of the spurious "freedom" of being adrift. Astrup's work is the precise opposite. Location is concrete, steady, permanent. It is an art of cosmic integration. This is the metaphysics of his landscapes, which are among the most beautiful and lyrical by any XXth century European painter:

Astrup was not naif; he was fully informed about the movements in modern art. He very deliberately chose to turn his back on them and to remain at Jølstravatnet immersed in a simple rural life with his family. He has a remarkably sure sense of his own style and what he wants to paint. He is, above all, grounded. There is no sense of the erratic, the decadent, the experimental. This is an artist who knows what he loves: his family, his country. It is not an art of rootlessness and inner conflict. 

The heavy lines, solidity and rich colours that Astrup brings to nordic landscapes is strongly reminiscent of the style of Nicholas Roerich.  But whereas Roerich - a Russian painting in Tibet and the Himalayas - looked to Boodhism, Astrup's landscapes are embued with a darker and more primeval magick. Many of his landscapes are haunted with ghostly figures of a former age. These are not secular, sanitized landscapes - they are not about land as property. There is a sense of a dark anima, a spirit of the land, much like the kami of Japan. 

A landscape haunted by the figure of corn stores

The spirituality in Astrup's work is a folk spirituality. Insofar as he is religious, his religion is cosmic, not moral or sentimental. His depictions of pagan festivals are probably his best known works in modern Norway:

Midsummer Night. Astrup painted many depictions of the midsummer bonfire festival, a celebration of ancient Norway's pagan roots. Biographies never fail to mention the fact that his father, a Christian pastor, frowned upon such festivities and forebad his children to attend them. As an adult Astrup took particular delight in them, although often in these paintings there is a lone figure watching the festivities from afar. We see people (folk) engaged in communion with the land and with the haunted spirit of the land. Through these festivals they engage with and become part of the great cycles of land and sky. Fire, the primal human element. 

It is in this landscape that man must live. Much of Astrup's art concerns agriculture, farming and domestic rural life - landscapes with men and women at work. The landscape is not always empty. 

Again, this is a celebration of traditional values: labour, soil, simplicity. And again, Astrup liked to underline the cycle of the seasons - the cosmic integration of rural labour - by painting the same scene, from the same viewpoint, several times:

A personal favourite of the present author. Picking rhubarb.

Then there is family and kinship. These are some of the most deeply conservative and most beautiful of Astrup's paintings. The artist married a young women, barely fifteen years old, and fathered eight children with her. Family, marriage and kinship are the human cosmos within the context of the land and the sky.  

Finally, interior and domestic scenes, and still life. The traditional love of the domestic world and its fruits, domestic economy, is a constant theme in Astrup's work. 

Astrup died quite young, in his late forties, from respiratory disease. But he was a prolific painter. The samples provided on this current page should be enough to demonstrate what a great artist he was and how the neglect to which he has been subject by the wider art establishment must rate as one of the scandals of modern art - and how insulting is his recent "rediscovery". Readers are invited to compare his work to that of Munch. Astrup complained that anything Munch did - any lousy squiggle, any rough sketch - was hailed as a masterpiece, while Astrup himself remained ignored. This injustice was entirely ideological. Munch pandered to the tastes of the liberal art establishment. Astrup, on the other hand, was a conservative whose paintings celebrated deeply conservative themes. His works became loved in traditional Norway, but they were too conservative for the cosmopolitan elites. These same elites, let us note, have of recent times undermined traditional life in Norway, as elsewhere, mainly through the strategy of mass immigration. The tensions unleashed by this strategy were seen in the political killings perpetrated by the nationalist extremist Anders Behring Breivik. Today, Norwegian society is increasingly torn. It is in this context that Astrup is being "rediscovered" and in this context his work and the themes he celebrates takes on a new poignancy and relevance. He emerges as one of the great conservative painters - in theme rather than style - of the modern era. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black