Winter isn't all bad – these "sublime" landscapes of the frozen North from the turn of the 20th Century offer us a way into resilience – and an "acceptance of the seasonality of life".
With its bare trees, long nights and icy temperatures, it's perhaps unsurprising that, culturally in the Northern Hemisphere, we seem so conditioned to complain about winter. Yet, as the author Katherine May points out in her 2020 book Wintering, winter is also a valuable time for rest and retreat. "Winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit," she writes. Its "starkness", she argues, re-sensitises us, and "can reveal colours that we would otherwise miss".
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| View from Pyynikki Ridge (1900) by Helmi Biese, depicts a bird's-eye view of the Finnish boreal forest (Credit: Finnish National Gallery / Alteneum Art Museum) |
For Nordic countries, where, in some regions, the season can last more than six months, making peace with winter is a necessity, with concepts such as the Norwegian friluftsliv (embracing the natural world) and the Danish hygge (hunkering down with simple comforts) offering fresh perspectives on cold weather.
At the turn of the 20th Century, the frozen North – with its vast fjords, mystical boreal forests and radiant light – became a powerful muse for artists such as Hilma af Klint, Edvard Munch and Harald Sohlberg. These artists immersed themselves in these cold climates, and developed a specifically Nordic style of painting imbued with their emotional responses to the landscape. Around 70 of these intensely atmospheric, expressionist works by artists from Scandinavia, Finland and Canada are being showcased in a new exhibition, Northern Lights, a cross-Atlantic collaboration that debuts at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, before travelling to New York's Buffalo AKG Art Museum in August.
First published at BBC News, January 29, 2025
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