Time in the landscape
Ásgrímur Jónsson & Arngunnur Ýr
June 9 – September 15, 2013
Jón Proppé
Ásgrímur Jónsson grew up on a farm in Southern Iceland and, as a teenager, worked in a nearby village where he acquired his first set of watercolours. Encouraged to pursue his talent, he travelled to Copenhagen in 1897 and entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He also travelled to Germany and spent a year in Rome. He returned to Iceland regularly and spent the summers painting the landscape but by the time he moved back in 1909 Icelandic society had changed a great deal.
It was a time of prosperity, not least in the city, Reykjavík, and the towns along the coast which had grown rapidly. The fishing fleet was being motorised, export and import flourished and foreign influences were felt in the urban centres. Ásgrímur settled in Reykjavík but for his whole life he spent much of his time painting in the countryside.
Jónsson’s output was quite varied. He painted in oils and watercolours, drew in pencil and ink, and his work includes a large body of landscape paintings, but also portraits, urban scenes, still lives and pictures based on history and folk tales. It was, however, the landscapes that immediately gained him an audience. Already in 1904, a local newspaper praised his work:
No one who sees these landscape paintings can afterwards doubt the grandeur and beauty of this country, if he was not already convinced. Our nation is richer for this young artist if he does not, like so many others, dry up in the despair of poverty.¹
Paintings showing the beauty and vastness of Icelandic nature captured the minds of a generation that had moved to the city but still had strong memories of the countryside and they also seemed to confirm the nation’s right to rule itself, a heated issue at a time when Icelanders were gradually gaining independence from Denmark. In the first decades of the twentieth century, more and more Icelanders travelled abroad to study art and they brought back different ideas from the ferment of the European art world. The Icelandic artists also tackled different subjects but it is safe to say that landscape paintings enjoyed the greatest popularity and dominated Icelandic art to a large extent until the middle of the century. When Ásgrímur Jónsson died in 1958, abstract art had come to Iceland and even stranger ideas were brewing, yet landscape painting continued. Today, more than half a century later, we can see that despite the tumult of new styles and approaches in art, interest in the landscape has never disappeared completely but rather taken a new form with each generation.
It is therefore interesting to look at two artists together, Ásgrímur Jónsson and Arngunnur Ýr, who stand, so to say, at opposite ends of the century.
In what way is their art different? What connects them? What can we learn from the comparison?
Ásgrímur Jónsson and his contemporaries approached the landscape through a well established tradition that had flowered in Western Europe in the nineteenth century. Painters in the Nordic Countries had put great store by capturing the light and colours of the land and the broad vistas of the countryside and the vast wilderness areas. When Jónsson exhibited in Oslo in 1910 he received praise in print from Christian Krogh, one of Norway’s best known painters at the time, for having “captured such awesome grandeur and vastness in a his picture that men feel small when confronted with it”.² The master was talking about a large painting of the volcano Hekla that Jónsson had painted the previous year and already exhibited in Reykajvík where it caused much discussion. In it can be seen what the art historian Björn Th. Björnsson was later to call “the moderate influence of Impressionism”, especially in the clear colours and the light they carry in the painting.³ This emphasis on the effects of light in landscape became the Jónsson’s main pursuit in the next decades, even though the Hekla painting was somewhat disputed when he first exhibited it in Reykjavík.
It has often been said that the first landscape painters, led by Ásgrímur Jónsson, opened the eyes of the Icelanders to the beauty of their country. Prima facie it seems far-fetched that it should take a picture for people to see what is right before their eyes but this is precisely what paintings do – good paintings at any rate. They can bring out that which we do not notice in the course of our daily lives and thus change our view of our surroundings. This transformation is not always easy and Jónsson himself later told a story of when he exhibited his Hekla painting in 1909:
I especially remember that one of the guests, a well known and educated man, ran furious with anger from the exhibition. He said that he had never seen such colours as were in my painting and insisted that they did not exist. I encountered this problem for years, that people did not always find it easy to accept colours that would now be thought a normal phenomenon in nature, and this reminds one of the story that no one noticed the London fog until Turner began to paint it.⁴
Jónsson’s experience might indicate that art can, in some sense and only gradually, shape our perception of the landscape, of light and colour. Most likely, though, there is a more complicated interaction at work. All paintings, even the most realistic ones, present some interpretation of their subject. Instead of being a neutral reproduction of visual reality, they tell a story or document the artist’s experience and his attempt to capture what he has experienced. The light and the colours are testimony to the artist’s attitude or the approach he takes to his subject. When we see an unusual painting it is perhaps most often the painter’s approach that we find unfamiliar and we can imagine that this experience would have been stronger when the paintings were among the first that Icelanders had seen depicting their landscape.
Just the fact that someone has stood for days staring at a mountain and mixing colours to paint its picture could be said to be evidence of a strange attitude – or to undertake arduous journeys just to look at a waterfall or a patch of lava. The landscape painter’s approach involves a set of values quite different from what we look to in our daily lives. He or she takes the time to just look at the landscape and think about it, goes into wilderness areas merely to dwell there without any practical purpose.The experience he or she seeks and tries to communicate in the painting is primarily an aesthetic one, serving nothing but itself.
If we put ourselves in the landscape painter’s shoes we find that time passes differently. We are there merely to look at the landscape, to watch the light at different times of day, to contemplate the shapes and colours that the light reveals and try to figure out how it all comes together as a whole. We realise that the task is in fact an endless one. Not only does the landscape change according to the time of day but also according to the season, the weather, etc. If we move, even just a few metres, everything can look different. We can return time and again to look at the same mountain or the same tree and always discover something new.
The landscape tradition that Ásgrímur Jónsson took up around 1900 centred to a large extent on this very experience: The artist went out into the landscape to dwell there, to live with the landscape in order to communicate his experience to his audience. When Arngunnur Ýr began to study art, eight decades later, there were few who followed this tradition and those who did were often treated with a degree of suspicion. It seemed that landscape painting was dying a slow death.
It was not that artists were no longer interested in their natural surroundings; only the approach had changed. The emphasis was no longer on the aesthetic experience of the landscape and had shifted instead to more intellectual interpretations. In the Icelandic context this shift could be seen the works of many artists already in the 1970s and 1980s. Douwe Jan Bakker created a kind of encyclopaedia of the Icelandic landscape by pairing words for different landscape features with photographs. Sigurður Guðmundsson dug a hole deep enough so that the mound of dirt he had shovelled out was the same height as he himself, standing in the hole. In 1980 a large outdoor exhibition was held near Reykjavík where 45 artists showed work that in one way or another was about the land but none of them showed a traditional landscape painting.
Arngunnur Ýr studied at the College of Art and Crafts in Reykjavík and then at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at Mills College in Oakland where she took an MA degree in 1992. She has since lived mostly in California though she spends a lot of her time in Iceland.
Her first private exhibition in Iceland was in 1989. The landscape did not play a big role in her work at the time though some pieces in the exhibition can be seen in retrospect as indicating her interest in the natural environment. In her next exhibitions one could see how she gradually moved closer to nature – for example in the large cloudscapes she exhibited at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík in 1994. In an exhibition in 1996 the landscape had become her main subject.
It centred on volcanoes and the paintings involved a sort of mapping of craters, evidence of Iceland’s unstable geography. The paintings were certainly beautiful and well executed but very different from the landscapes of earlier generations, with strong references to geology and scientific research. To underline this, she had borrowed a seismic sensor which she installed in the gallery.
Gradually, nature came to feature more prominently in Arngunnur Ýr’s art but not in the tradition in which Ásgrímur Jónsson worked. She did not go en plein air to paint and her paintings did not depict recognisable places. There were no features by which we could navigate the landscape: No Hekla. The landscape in these paintings is mostly indistinct and it can be hard to distinguish between land, sea and sky. The titles, too, indicate that the paintings are to be seen as meditations on abstract ideas and concepts, rather than being about the landscape they show. In paintings such as End of Time IV from 2000, the landscape appears in the distance, an unknown coastline, but what strikes the viewer is the surface of the painting itself which seems to be eroding away. The landscape serves the idea that time erodes all things.
It is not until in the last few years that Arngunnur Ýr began to paint landscapes that we can actually recognise and name, as she frequently does by using place names as titles. At the same time it is as though her painting has gained a new energy. The brushwork is freer and more vigorous, the colour combinations more daring and the flow in the construction greater than ever before.
Her paintings, nonetheless, remain very differ ent from those of earlier landscape painters. She is not limited by realism and even when she paints well known places she permits herself more play and fantasy that was customary all those decades ago. She shares her time between two counties, the United States and Iceland, and both countries appear in her landscape paintings, sometimes in the very same painting. Thus, two national parks, Þingvellir in Iceland and Yosemite in California, can share the same canvas without conflict – until knowledgeable people try to name the peaks.
How can it be that after painting and exhibiting for a quarter century, Arngunnur Ýr has now arrived at a stage where her paintings sometimes have a strange, if vague, similarity to the paintings of someone like Ásgrímur Jónsson? The reason is not that she did not know the landscape or was not sensitive to it. On the contrary, she is an avid hiker and has worked in summer as a mountain guide in the Icelandic highlands. She has, admittedly, lived abroad, but Iceland is not the only place where there is landscape (despite what you might hear from some Icelanders) and California has wilderness areas and broad vistas, just like Ice land. A more likely explanation is that Arngunnur Ýr’s journey into the landscape has something to do with attitude and approach – with the connection between the world and art, between experience and image.
When artists first began to paint landscapes without people there were probably many who were taken by surprise: There was nothing happening in the picture, no people, no story. Landscape paintings were not about telling stories but sought to explore man’s experience in the face of nature, in which people thought they could sense a deep truth. When one takes the time to really look at the landscape one experiences its overwhelming mass and permanence. Time in the landscape is like the time of god and man becomes puny and small when confronted by its vastness. This is what the aestheticians of the eighteenth century meant when they said that the beauty of the landscape was sublimis, elevated and beyond the comprehension of man. This is not something we experience rushing down a highway or raking away to gather the hay before an approaching storm. Only by dwelling in the landscape with no other purpose do we sense this godly presence, however we may then wish to interpret it.
The art of the twentieth century has mostly turned its back on ideas of this sort. Abstract artists rejected all representation and wanted visual art to become like music, pure and independent of the material world. Later in the century, art movements emerged that not only rejected the representation of physical reality but thought that the artwork itself did not have to be material, that it could stand on its own as a pure idea. In the last decades, however, we have seen many artists put a renewed emphasis on the viewer’s experience, some by showing something so overwhelming that we stand before it mute and astounded. The sun that Ólafur Elíasson installed under a mirrored ceiling in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall can serve as a good example and comes as close as any landscape painting to being sublimis.
Ásgrímur Jónsson and Arngunnur Ýr approach their subject from different premises – quite naturally, in light of the history that separates them. Nonetheless, it is instructive to see their paintings side by side and, despite everything, we can find similarities. The landscape was Jónsson’s primary subject from the beginning and he stuck to it, though he explored other subjects as well. Arngunnur Ýr’s journey into the landscape has been longer and, furthermore, there is nothing to say that she will stay with it forever or not radically change her approach. Her paintings are not like those of Jónsson, in the sense that the paintings of some of his contemporaries can be said to be like his. But there is a sort of dialogue between them – no Icelandic artist could sincerely attempt landscape painting without being aware of and understanding Jónsson’s contribution. It is interesting to see a contemporary artist paints the same subjects that Jónsson and other older artists grappled with but the dialogue is not only about painting the same mountains. It is also about how we experience our environment and about what art can communicate.
Like the landscape, art has its own time, but the wheels turn faster. It is quite impossible that a contemporary artist could approach the landscape with the same intention and attitude that Jónsson did. Everything that happens in art is irreversible, like history itself, and today’s art can neither be made nor understood without taking into consideration all the discoveries, transformations and research that characterised art in the last century. That was also the case in Jónsson’s day and he himself took part in transforming the approach to landscape art. In Arngunnur Ýr’s art we can see the legacy of several avant-garde movements from the twentieth century, for example in her emphasis on the surface or skin of the painting, in the connections she makes to other fields such as geology, and in how she uses landscape painting to explore abstract ideas. Just as Jónsson was, she is aware of the history and aware of what she herself wants to add to it. Landscape painting in the hands of a contemporary artist can never be a return to some past era.
On the other hand, it is impossible to look at the paintings of these two artists without sensing that both seem to find a liberating vitality and flow in their landscapes. The paintings are playful and the colours blossom forth like a tonal poem. It is tempting to recall that both of them have been fascinated by music and played music themselves: The paintings reveal expressive scales of tone in their colours and a strong rhythmic sense in the treatment of line and form. That, in itself, is elevating – something sublimis.
[1] Fjallkonan. 15 november 1904, p. 1.
[2] Tómas Guðmundsson. Ásgrímur Jónsson. Reykjavík:
Helgafell, 1962, p. 66.
[3] Björn Th. Björnsson. Íslensk myndlist á 19. og 20. öld.
I. bindi. Reykjavík: Helgafell, 1964, p. 80.
[4] Tómas Guðmundsson, p. 60.
About the artists:
Ásgrímur Jónsson 1876–1958
Ásgrímur Jónsson was born and raised in Flói in Árnes County, Southern Iceland. Just turned twenty, he went to Copenhagen, determined to study art. He supported himself by working as a house painter and attended evening classes in drawing. In 1900 he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art and studied there for three years. Afterwards he lived in Copenhagen for several years, spending the summers in Iceland. In 1908 he received a travel grant from the Icelandic parliament to go to Italy, visiting Weimar, Munich and Berlin on the way. He frequently participated in the spring exhibitions at Charlottenborg in Copenhagen and his works have been shown in many European countries, Russia and the USA. Asgrimur was also fond of music and recently it was discovered that he even composed music.
Ásgrímur Jónsson was one of the pioneers in bringing modern art to Iceland and one of the first to make art his profession. One of the nation’s most important landscape artists, he worked both in oils and watercolours. He travelled widely around Iceland, painting en plein air. A keen sense of the hues of light and the character of colour, combined with the quest for beauty, are the hallmarks of his works, although various artistic movements and emphases can be seen over his long career.
Arngunnur Ýr 1962
Arngunnur was born and raised in Reykjavík, Iceland. She graduated from the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in 1984 and then went to the San Francisco Art Institute where she received her BFA in painting in 1986. She was an Artist in Residency at Gerrit Rietveldt Academie in Amsterdam, Holland, 1989–90 and completed her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. Before Arngunnur studied art she had studied music from 1970 at Kópavogur and Reykjavík Conservatory of Music and at the Halifax Conservatory in Canada.
Arngunnur divides her time between Iceland and California and calls both places home. In Iceland she sometimes works as a tourist guide, exploring and explaining the landscape.
Arngunnur started her career in neo expressionism but has evolved her landscape painting for the last twenty years. She has received numerous awards and recognition for her work as a painter, such as the Svavar Guðnason and Ásta Eiríksdóttir grant, and in 2005 she received a Pollock-Krasner grant. Her works have been exhibited worldwide and are represented in public and private collections.
Curator:
Jón Proppé (born 1962) studied philosophy at the University of Illinois, United States, but lives and works in Reykjavík. His writings on art and culture include hundreds of exhibition reviews, essays, monographs and book chapters, and more than 100 exhibition catalogues published in Iceland and the Nordic Countries, the United States and United Kingdom, Germany and France. He has also curated exhibitions for museums and other institutions in Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Germany. In 1994–96 he served as interim director of Hafnarborg, the Art Museum of Hafnarfjörður, Iceland, and on various public projects and appointments since. He has also worked in publishing as an editor and book designer, taught at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and elsewhere, lectured and led seminars, and worked on several documentary films for television and cinema as a writer and producer. Jón is one of the authors of a new five volume history of Icelandic art in the twentieth century, published in 2011.