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Exhibiting the Northern Light

(Picture: Pmurph5)]

(Picture: Aeroid)]

(29.-30.4.2023) In 2023, fifty years after Picasso’s death, it is becoming obvious that Picasso is no longer a cultural force anymore. Obviously there is, despite of many exhibitions, a certain Picasso scepticism, and Picasso, the embodiment of 20th century art, has become part of the tradition, brief: a classic. Which means that Picasso still can offer much, and the Picasso cosmos is worth studying (not the least because it emcompasses everything else, as it may), but one has actively seek for a relation with Picasso, because the relation is not simply existing per se, and certainly not for everyone. One is not under the spell of Picasso anymore, as many people had been, up to the 1970s.
Thinking of the Blue Period in Picasso (many people might know that there was a Blue Period in Picasso), it seems to me, that it could make sense to put Picasso in context in this respect: yes, there was a Blue Period in Picasso, stimulated also by Symbolism, but looking at the history of Symbolism, and studying the motif of the blue hour in painting and in literature, it is becoming obvious that Picasso was actually a late-comer. One other, perhaps the other center of blue painting, is Nordic Symbolism, Nordic painting of the 1890s. And what we do here is to embark on an exploration of the Northern light. Last but not least, this means also to put Picasso in context, and to confront Picasso with what Nordic painters had done before. And it is telling that also the exhibiting of Nordic painters has its history: a history that started in the 1980s, which means: after the death of Picasso.

(Picture: Bjřrn Christian Třrrissen;
polar night blue twilight (September), but not actually at nighttime)]

1) The Natural History of Light

Depending on how far the sun has sunk below the horizon – or, in the morning, to what degree still is below the horizon – we get a different kind of twilight. The small picture above on the right shows the various definitions and terms, brief: the names we have for different phases of common twilight, beautiful names such as the ›nautical‹ twilight for example, or the ›civil‹ twilight.
The large picture above is showing that, depending on how far we move north in Europe, in summer and at midnight, we will find a different state: the phenomenon of twilight can expand from being a passing phase in the rhythm of day and night, to a more constant, insistent or enduring twilight, for which we also have names: the legendary ›white nights‹ for example – when it is not getting dark, and when twilight, the state of twilight with its psychological implications, good or bad, is becoming the new norm. Constant day can also be the norm, as we move even further North to arctic regions, or, during the winter, constant night. Hence it is actually totally obvious that in Nordic cultures twilight, and also the color blue, and everything that one would subsume under a ›Nordic natural history of light‹, must have specific, perhaps enhanced cultural implications. People live with it, interact with it, and give meanings to it. For a painter born in Málaga such cultural implications must have seemed rather exotic; exotic as the Southern light (which, for example, Edvard Munch experienced in Nice) must have been for a Nordic painter. And of course the exotic experience can have a role, again, in the experiencing of the perhaps all-too-well known, in the North or South.

It is not that easy to divide the natural history of light from cultural history, if one thinks that, in the 1890s, the medium of film got invented; which means also that, from now on, time-lapse-sequences of sunrise or sunset were possible (I still have to find out when the first such sequence was made). One could, in the medium of film, artificially create representations of what is happening in nature, speed it up or slow it down, which, again, would influence the perception of what one can observe in nature. And on a even more basic level: artificial light, the history of artificial light, simply, although this is perhaps only obvious to specialists, has an influence on how (and when) birds are singing in the morning: cultural history thus is influencing, one must say, also natural history: we get a different kind of concert in the morning.

2) Exhibitional History

It seems that the 1982/83 Northern Light exhibition, organized by Kirk Varnedoe, is generally seen as the main point of reference: by that exhibition in the Brooklyn museum, and since then the ›Northern Light‹ topos was established, and probably internationally established. I don’t have put together a full chronicle of such exhibitions of Nordic Fin-de-sičcle painting that, on one way or another, associated Nordic painting around 1900 with Nordic light (which is understandable, given what was said above, but not a necessity), but I do own a couple of catalogues myself, and I do know that for example there had been exhibitions in 1986 (Im Lichte des Nordens), 1998 (Landschaft als Kosmos der Seele), and 2013 (Aus Dämmerung und Licht). Can Nordic painting be seen dissociated from such associations? It seems possible, since painting is not about light per se, or associated with psychology per se or with specific poetological ideas, it can work as pure imagination for example, as purely artificial creation, but the association is strong, perhaps for a number of reasons: since there were good painters in the Nordic countries in the 1890s, since painting, using color, usually establishes a relation with light and color as such, and, on a very elementary level: natural light, and the rhythm of day and light, have strong and very elementary cultural implications always, and perhaps one has also to add that literary movements – such as the Modern Breakthrough can help to produce such amalgam as the Nordic Symbolism in painting topos, seen as an interaction of natural history in terms of Northern light, and inner movement and moods, plus poetic ideas that organize such interactions, plus individual artists confirming and establishing such aesthetic of twilight, evening and night – as a cosmos of human’s inner life, which is projected into nature, or influenced by or set into nature.

3) Individual Artists – Individual Histories

The Blue Period in the work of Swedish artist Eugčne Jansson is the one Blue Period in a painter’s oeuvre that preceded the Blue Period in Picasso, since Jansson painted the Stockholm twilight again and again, during the 1890s, transforming also what he could see into more imaginative landscapes. The Blue Period in Jansson, thus, is not an Impressionist revival, or largely focussed on observing the light. In subtle ways all that can be observed during twilight, the melting of the individual form into clusters of objects (see the painting of skaters on the right), organizes in such paintings as poetically transformed views; ornaments seem to come in, movement – in terms of whirls –, and brushwork, brushstrokes, the rhythm of working with the brush, is probably adding and insinuating psychological implications. Jansson is also known as a painter of the male act, and one might say that the general cultural trends, also the aspect of emancipation or repression of homosexuality, are part of the Nordic light amalgam, made of history, nature, culture and meaning. I would not know of an exhibition that would have confronted the work of Jansson, with its focus on the blue twilight and on the male nude, with the Blue Period of Picasso and his acts. But it seems necessary to confront the work of Picasso more with parallel or alternative phenomena, since the oeuvre of Picasso is still very much in the center of cultural perception, and perhaps somewhat too much in the center, if the oeuvre of Picasso is outshining what was going on in the history of painting around 1900 and beyond, and if it is not clear to everybody that Symbolism was something that Picasso could absorb (as he was able to absorb anything), but that Picasso was not the only creative force in Symbolism, nor did Picasso invent this amalgam of observation and imagination. Picasso was perhaps the most skilled and thus best equipped painter, but his individual existential drama was and is not more important or more interesting per se than the existential drama of any other person. Picasso was only better equipped than most, to reflect it in the medium of painting, which is the reason that, culturally, it has become so important (and perhaps more important than the oeuvre of most other painters). But these dimensions have to be carefully distinguished.

The individual existential drama of Edvard Munch found its expression in paintings of twilight, evening and night, for example in the Melancholy series, whose chronology is not that easy to establish. Perhaps Munch, who had been travelling to Paris and also to the South of France, before returning to Norway, and before painting some of his most iconic paintings, perhaps Munch is the best example for studying how the experience of the Southern and the Nordic light might interact in the mind of a painter. A critic found that, in Munch, empty spaces or muddy areas in a canvas seemed to stand in for various kinds of light and atmospheres, and this was probably meant as a criticism, but the way Munch painted gave way, just by avoiding the more Impressionist observational stance, to inner movements, by just alluding to phenomena of nature, and by focussing on what happened in the mind of the artist. If we realize that, we have realized that our journey from addressing the most elementary phenomena of nature has led us to the introspective aesthetic of an iconic painter, who, in his mind, used the atmospheres observed in nature, to stage his existential drama. And jealousy, despair, melancholy and fears have not necessarily something to do with the time of day or night, but can be staged in relation to twilight and night, atmospheres that allow to focus rather on the existential drama, set in the frame of cultural history, and literary movements, than on the actual Nordic light.