The North Cape

 Peder Balke, The North Cape, c.1840

There are still four months to see the fascinating Peder Balke exhibition currently on at the National Gallery.  I have written about him on this blog before - in Landscape from Finnmark I highlighted the trip he made in 1832 beyond the North Cape and in Gausta Peak I focused on the way his reputation has risen as critics and collectors have come to view his later work in the light of Modernism. This exhibition shows how often the artist returned to his memories of the North, adding strange light effects or reducing the motif to a bare abstract form.  As Christopher Riopelle writes in the catalogue, 'the cape's angular notched profile is as distinctive as Paul Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire. The experimental side of Balke is also evident, particularly in a group of ghostly monochrome sketches lent by the Daniel Katz gallery (they recently donated a Balke to the Gallery's permanent collection).  With their thin washes worked over with fingers and comb such works have, according to Riopelle, particularly caught the attention of collectors, 'so intriguing are the processes of their making and so remarkable the powers of evocation they employ in such small compass.'

Peder Balke, Northern Lights over Coastal Landscape, 1870

Looking back at the notes I made at the exhibition in November I see I disliked some paintings that now look good to me in the catalogue - probably something to do with the thinness, dullness and age of the paint when viewed up close.  But I was particularly excited by the way some of Balke's coastal landscapes, with their high peaks floating over empty clouds, resembled Chinese ink paintings.  Riopelle refers to this in his essay: 'spared areas magically summon up complicated motifs like waterfalls, or receding mountain ranges, or trails through fields and up hillsides, along which the eye, like a Chinese scholar on a contemplative stroll through his garden, can freely roam.'  In his review of the exhibition Alastair Sooke complains that scholars haven't done more to find out whether Balke was aware of Chinese art, although Friedrich and Turner are a more obvious starting point for seas of fog and mountains shrouded in mist.

Anders Fredrik Skjöldebrand, Arrival at the North Cape (18th-19th July 1799), 1801-2

In addition to Riopelle's reflections ('Balke / London / Then / Now') the catalogue has a biographical essay by Marit Ingeborg Lange based largely on Balke's own memoirs, which it would be fascinating to read (they have not even been fully published in Norwegian). There is also a short piece by Knut Ljøgodt, Director of The Northern Norway Art Museum in Tromsø, which discusses Balke in relation to the 'artistic discovery of Norway'.  This began with the Danish painter Erik Paulsen, who travelled to Norway in 1788, and was followed by others, including the leading Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl, who would become a supporter of Balke.  Northern Norway first appears in an engraved travelogue (see above) and later became a recurring theme for a contemporary of Balke's, Knud Baade, who made the journey to Nordland in 1834.  Balke's journey two years earlier was the furthest north any Norwegian artist had gone.  In this paragraph quoted by Lange he has found respite from a storm-tossed sea at Vardøhus Fortress.

'The day after our arrival at Vardø I crossed the island for a good view of the sea breaking against the cliffs after the previous day's hurricane, and the magnificent sight that manifested itself to my scrutinizing gaze will never fade from my memory.  I had positioned myself on a rocky plateau some 100 feet above the sea, and I felt I had to hold on tight to the cliff when the backwash hurled itself against the rock face and with a deafening sound like thunder rolled out again into the heaving sea, only to repeat the same fruitless onslaught on the unshakeable wall around which swirled the mighty waves of the Arctic Ocean.'

Peder Balke, Vardøhus Fortress, 1870

Gausta Peak

I mentioned Peder Balke in connection with the National Gallery's 'Forests, Rocks, Torrents' exhibition but thought I would add another post because he is an interesting example of that not uncommon phenomenon, the rediscovered landscape artist. Christopher Riopelle says in the catalogue that Balke is only emerging now 'in international eyes as a master of Norwegian landscape, the subject of exhibitions, scholarly publications and bidding wars in auction rooms.'  The National Gallery recently bought a small seascape The Tempest -  the first Balke painting to enter a British public collection.  Riopelle compares Balke to August Strindberg, whose landscape painting (see my earlier post) has also only come to prominence in recent decades.  'Like Strindberg, Balke was blithely convinced his work sat squarely in the mainstream,' whilst for us the paintings look more like forerunners of expressionism.   From the 1860s Balke gave up trying to make his living as a painter and turned instead to real estate (a sad fate for a landscape painter, one might think).  When he died in 1884 his art was forgotten, but in his spare time Balke had continued to produce experimental landscape paintings, drawing on the memories of his travels, and 'small black and white improvisations' like The Tempest.

Peder Balke, Gausta Peak, 1877

Another Nordic artist I've discussed here before, Per Kirkeby, wrote a book about Peder Balke in 1996 which in turn inspired a joint exhibition two years ago.  I have not had the opportunity to read this book but the website for Norwegian artist Espen Dietrichson includes a description.

'Kirkeby writes that, by looking at artists such as Balke, Turner and Delacroix, we can discover an alternative historical realism. This depends on identifying a range of painters’ ‘dirty tricks’, such as how texture can be used to create calculated, dramatic effects, and how experimentation with new perspectives can change perception. Kirkeby maintains that the pervading art historical distinction between pure abstraction and less honourable effects has traumatised art in relation to its history. This is why he finds it so important to solve the enigma of Peder Balke and to thereby understand why the elevated and sublime can only be achieved through the ‘dirtiest of means’. For example, Balke’s outsider position as a small-town painter-decorator [i.e. his early background, before training as an artist] allowed him to eschew the codified illusionism of (Norwegian) national romanticism, and hence to make use of techniques that differed radically from those of his contemporaries – marbling, or the use of sponges or combs on wet paint – which would have seemed a profanation of academic dogmas.'

Landscape from Finnmark

This week I popped into the National Gallery to see an interesting new exhibition: 'Forests, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde Collection'.  These two countries were in many ways very different in the nineteenth century - Switzerland prosperous, independent and rapidly industrialising, Norway poor, dominated by Denmark and Sweden and dependent on exporting its natural resources.  Swiss artists tended to stay in Switzerland whereas the Norwegians tended to travel. The importance of getting away from the familiar is illustrated in the case of Peder Balke (1804-87) who studied art in Christiania and Stockholm and began his career painting conventional landscapes.  In 1832, as Christopher Riopelle and Sarah Herring write in the catalogue, he travelled by ship to the North Cape, 'a rugged and largely inaccessible area of the country.  There he found bleak and original motifs which allowed him to define his highly individual painting style.  He continued to explore these motifs in increasingly austere images throughout his career.'  The exhibition includes Landscape from Finnmark (about 1860), an icy view across snow-covered rocks to distant grey mountains, dominated by a single tree, leaning at an angle as if battered by the elements.  The painting reproduced below is another of Balke's Finnmark scenes.

Peder Balke, From Hammerfest, 1851

Source: Wikimedia Commons

On entering the exhibition, the first thing you see is a large map on the wall, reproduced from an 1873 Baedecker on Switzerland, with pins showing locations of the paintings: The Wetterhorn, Lake Lucerne, the Valley of Lauterbrunnen and so on.  There are also pin maps of Norway, based on Thomas B. Wilson's 'Handy Guide' to the country of 1888.  These reminded me of another thing I've been doing this week: working on the Some Landscapes Timeline and Map.  I am still compiling this so the screenshots below represent work in progress.  The map shows a selection of places connected to my blog posts - I shall now be able to add a little Google pin on Finnmark.  The timeline, similarly, is no more than another way of viewing the blog, but I suppose you could see it as a rather eccentric history of landscape and culture.  So far it stretches from Sargon II's park at Ninevah (715 BCE) to Hamish Fulton's Everest ascent (2009).   Some of the dates relate to paintings or publications but many involve encounters with landscape: Wang Po at the Pavilion of the Prince of T'eng, Dorothy Wordsworth in Scotland, Olivier Messiaen in Utah, and here, Peder Balke in Finnmark.