Art History: Painting the North

Painting the North: Scandinavian and Russian Artists of the 19th and 20th Centuries - with Linda Hart

Session 1: Scandinavian painting tends to be overlooked in favour of French and German painting. However, because of the extraordinary light conditions in the Arctic Circle, these countries have produced some of the most luminous painting of all time. The other side of this climate system is the unremitting darkness of winter and the accompanying severe weather conditions.

Every culture has its myths and legends and perhaps the darkest of these sorts of stories have originated in countries situated in the Arctic Circle. We will study Edvard Munch, Nickolai Alstrup, Harald Sondheim and much loved children’s writer and illustrator, Tove Janssen.

Session 2: Russian artists of the late 19th and early to mid 20th century were also shaped by adverse conditions such as a hard climate, poverty and racial and political persecution. This sort of suffering creates extremely perverse, persistent and original creatives. The artists studied will be Chagall, Soutine, Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodchenko, Larinov, Goncharova and El Lisstzky.

The persuasions followed by these artists are as diverse as Russia itself and take in the first abstracts (Malevich and Kandinsky,) constructivism of (Malevich and El Lisstzky), the expressionism of Chagall and Soutine and the metaphysical imagery of Kandinsky.