"Impressionism and the North"
2002-09-25 until 2003-01-19
National Museum of Fine Arts
Stockholm, , SE

Visitors to Nationalmuseum will be met by a bounty of artworks by painters such as Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh as well as by Nordic artists such as Edvard Munch, Anders Zorn, Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Jens Ferdinand Willumsen. These latter were all influenced in different ways by contemporary French avant garde at the end of the 19th century and several years on. For the first time, an exhibition shows the relationship between French Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and art in the Nordic countries.

There are many links between, mainly French, Impressionism and artists in the Nordic region. The exhibition shows paintings done by Paul Gauguin during his time in Copenhagen in the mid-1800s. In that same period, Danish artist Theodor Philipsen was painting landscapes using a technique obviously inspired by Gauguin’s. Claude Monet spent the winter of 1895 in Norway painting winter landscapes and making the acquaintance of Norwegian painter Fritz Thaulow and Sweden’s ‘painter prince’, Prince Eugen. Monet studied the Nordic winter light and produced several series of paintings showing snowy landscapes in changing light and weather. The exhibition has a number of these works. At the time, the Norwegian Christian Krogh used a technique approximating the sketchiness of Impressionism but the most consistently Impressionistic painter in that period was his countryman Edvard Munch.

In Sweden, several artists in the 1880s were to approach Impressionism from different angles, even if most of them adhered to French Realism. The landscapes of Karl Nordström and Nils Kreuger, painted in sketch style and using bright colours, would occasionally resemble the Impressionist manner. Closest was perhaps Anders Zorn; in a series of paintings from around 1890, he captured fleeting impressions of contemporary life using broad and sketchy brushwork. At that time, Swedish painters Richard Bergh and Karl Nordström found inspiration in Gauguin’s later idiom.

IMAGE
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895)
In the Bois de Boulogne
Oil on canvas, 61 x 73.5
Nationalmuseum

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Sweden

Other Important Exhibitions in Sweden