The Brooklyn Rail

With Northern Lights, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum underscores the shared experiences of artists drawing inspiration from the planet’s largest land biome: the boreal forest. Featuring more than sixty landscape paintings by artists from Scandinavia and Canada, made between 1880 and 1930, the show offers a glimpse of the rugged forest that circles the Northern Hemisphere, crossing borders and uniting disparate people and places. As photographs and ephemera in the show attest to, the artists were often working exposed to the elements—on boats, in the remote forests, in makeshift plein air studios. Working during times of global conflict and in the midst of nations like Finland finding independence, these artists were creating a new visual language with expressive brushstrokes and perspectives that imbued psychological intensity. The moody, and at times foreboding, boreal forest offered fodder for their creative endeavors.

Despite the exhibition’s title, the aurora borealis are not the artists’ focus—only one depiction of the natural phenomenon is included. Rather, the artists captured the atmosphere of the boreal forest, the changing light across seasons, the crispness of air in wintery months, and the strength of the wind forcing its way through the trees. Very few people appear in the works on view, though their presence is at times implied. In Edvard Munch’s Train Smoke (1900), a train traverses a stunning lakeside landscape, cutting through the tall trees. The train itself is barely visible, masked by the smoke cloud billowing in its wake. Similarly, in The Yellow Log (1912), Munch painted a forest of trees with giant yellow logs scattered among them, having been felled likely for the paper industry, highlighting the artist’s awareness of man’s impact on nature. This is perhaps also the subject of Munch’s Vampire in the Forest (1924–25), in which two figures do appear. Crouched in the dense, green foliage with their nude bodies painted a similar color, one sucks the neck of the other, a possible allusion to humanity’s consumption of the environment.

Similar hints of man are seen in Swedish artist Gustaf Fjæstad’s Newly Fallen Snow (1909) in the form of footprints. The prints are deep, as if hours of snow have just finished blanketing the ground. Apart from these and smaller, shallower prints in the background, possibly left by a rabbit, the snow is largely untouched. Fjæstad’s treatment of the surface illustrates his intimate understanding of how the material reacts to the environment, the fluffy, stippled top layer kept soft by warmer air. This is not a frigid winter scene, but one of calm where the inclement weather has paused, allowing man to be alone in nature, for now. Indeed, there is a beautiful quietness to the room where the painting hangs that welcomes slow viewing and contemplation. Perhaps a result of my own love of winter or a visceral reaction to the oppressive heat that’s been barreling down this summer, a sense of nostalgia and relief felt palpable in this room—nostalgia for past moments of solitude in a peaceful snowscape and relief knowing colder weather is around the corner.

Northern Lights is not the first time the museum has shown Fjæstad’s work. A testament to the importance of cultural exchange, in 1913, the institution, then known as the Albright Art Gallery, staged Contemporary Scandinavian Art, the first large-scale exhibition of Scandinavian art in North America, and included among the more than forty artists in the group show was Fjæstad. His keen grasp of the remote, unspoiled natural world had a direct impact on some Canadian visitors, including J. E. H. MacDonald and Lawren S. Harris. In 1920, the artists became part of what was known as the Group of Seven, a collective of Canadian landscape painters who worked roughly until 1933 and helped develop a new modern identity for the nation that celebrated its rugged expanses of nature. One of the group’s founders, A.Y. Jackson, credited its formation with Harris and MacDonald’s enthusiasm for the paintings they’d seen in the Scandinavian exhibition. Works by both Harris and MacDonald are included in Northern Lights, as well as Tom Thomson, who was associated with its members but died before the Group of Seven was formed.

All three artists painted stunning snowy scenes, similar to Fjæstad’s, that show equal attention to its materiality. In MacDonald’s Snowbound (1915), a large tree is so weighted with snow its branches have bent to touch the ground. Patches of vibrant orange sunlight peek through the forest, peppering the white ground. In Thomson’s Snow in October (1916–17), he offers a softer dusting, the trees bathed in light and their snow-covered branches standing tall in the calm, still air. Thomson’s treatment of trees is particularly remarkable. In a small study titled Fire-Swept Hills (1915), he depicted charred trees in desolate hills, orange embers still burning; the smoky air chokes the gray sky. With this work, it’s hard not to think of the unprecedented scale of the Canadian wildfires we see today and the devastating toll they’ve taken on the carbon-storing trees of the boreal forest. Nearby, in Thomson’s Pine Island, Georgian Bay (1914–16), the trees whip with intensity, as if the wind is a physical entity of the work.

That fact that artists from areas thousands of miles apart found kindred spirits is unsurprising. Their ability to depict the landscape with such a keen understanding of weather and light underscores how closely they worked in and with the natural world, giving life to the elements as if the atmosphere itself is their subject. There’s something comforting, even romantic, about this. In the tumultuous political climates the artists were working in—with backdrops of war, division, and revival—it’s hard not to find parallels with today. The constant is the land, as are the trees that grow and the snow that falls. Nature knows no geopolitical borders, and neither does the boreal forest.