“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:
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.
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
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
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