Must-see art in Buffalo, NY

Northern Lights exhibit at Buffalo AKG Art Museum

This stellar exhibit is being shown in only two museums in the world: The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, NY. OK, Basel is a world art capital, so that makes sense. But why Buffalo? In 1913, the Albright Art Gallery (since renamed the Buffalo AKG) hosted the Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art, the first large-scale presentation of Scandinavian landscape painting in America. Among the artists inspired by the exhibition were painters from Canada, which sits across a thin river but a long cultural divide from the US. Some of those inspired by the exhibit went on to pioneer Canada's first modern national art movement, the Group of Seven.

This exhibit represents a full-circle moment, with Group of Seven painters being shown alongside Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish artists. All of them share a love for the compelling beauty of the North and its extreme climate, primeval forest, and magical night skies – nature at its most wild and magnificent.    

Some of the Scandinavian painters I was familiar with, including the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela; one of his large-scale paintings, Mäntykoski Waterfall, was among my favorites in the show. The sheer size of the painting (nearly 9 ft by 5 ft) heightens the sense of the waterfall’s power, and the close cropping makes the viewer feel as though they are almost under the cascade. The energetic brush strokes in the water convey intense energy, heightened by the high value contrast between the foaming white water and the dark rock cliff.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Mäntykoski Waterfall, oil on canvas, roughly 9’x5’, 1892-1894

Gallen-Kallela was friends with the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose symphonies were inspired by Finnish nature and mythology. The five golden strings stretched along the length of the canvas are an abstract reference to nature’s music and the sounds of the waterfall, and possibly also a tribute to his friend Sibelius. The ornate decorative frame was created by a contemporary painter friend and envisioned by Gallen-Kallela as an extension of the painting; the patterning and color echo some of the lighter-value rock surfaces. 

There was a roomful of other large-scale paintings in this exhibit, including works by Swedish painter Gustaf Fjæstad, which were technically proficient, but didn’t really move me in the same way that Gallen-Kallela’s masterpiece did. Of far more interest to me were a dozen or so small panels by members of the Group of Seven that had compelling energy and power, despite their relatively small size (mostly 11x14 or so). These small works on panel were mostly painted en plein air and feature energetic brushwork and simplification of forms. The paintings are all in one room at the end of the exhibit, where they are hung in recessed cells set in all four sides of a series of columns. This unusual hanging technique clearly communicates that each of these paintings are part of a cohesive group, but deserve their own time in the limelight. The window-like spaces focus attention on only one piece at a time, providing the visual separation that a standard wall grouping wouldn’t.   

Lawren Harris, Mitchell Lake, 11” x 14” oil on panel, circa 1918-1921

My absolute favorite of these panels is Lawren Harris’s Mitchell Lake (roughly 11” x 14”). The color palette is superb, as is the placement of trees in the foreground. The squiggles of paint are joyful (see closeup below). This painting is one of a group known as Harris’s Algoma sketches painted during his trips to the Algoma region from roughly 1918–1924, where he painted at Mitchell and Sand lakes, and began his move toward more abstracted, simplified shapes. Harris uses foreground trees as vertical rhythmic elements that both divide the picture plane and focus attention on the lake beyond. The water is rendered as broad horizontal bands of intense color, contrasting with the vertical tree rhythms and creating a strong, graphic structure.

Detail of the far shore, showing the squiggly, expressive brushwork of Lawren Harris.

Another small gem on an adjacent column is J.E. H. MacDonald’s A Lakeshore, Algoma, painted in the same geographic region and contemporaneous with Harris’s painting. While the color palette is more muted than Harris’s, the brushwork is equally compelling. Really, every small panel in this room is a gem, including The Canoe, Snow in October, and other works by Tom Thomson.

J.E.H. MacDonald, A Lakeshore, Algoma, 10” x 14” oil on canvas, 1921

As for other favorite works in this show, I was delighted that so many of them were by female artists, including the Swedish painter Anna Boberg, who was the only female included in the landmark show of contemporary Scandinavian painters in Buffalo in 1913. Boberg’s Northern Lights. Study from North Norway, features shimmering shafts of turquoise, mauve, and white light. Boberg painted the atmospheric conditions of the Lofoten Islands off Norway’s northwestern coast for over thirty years, insulating herself from freezing temperatures with a specially made suit of furs. She transported a portable easel mounted on a frame by strapping it to her body.

Anna Boberg, Northern Lights. Study from North Norway, 97 × 75 cm, undated

Helmi Biese is relatively unknown today, even in her native Finland. Another female Scandinavian painter whose name is seemingly everywhere these days is also in this show: Hilma af Klint. This Swedish painter is best known for her large-scale, spiritually-inspired abstract paintings, which have been celebrated with major retrospectives at the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and elsewhere. These abstract works both predate and surpass the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Mondrian, and other male artists who have historically received far more attention. (Of course, some of this oversight was of her own doing: Af Klint stipulated that her abstract work should not be shown publicly until at least 20 years after her death, as she was convinced the world wasn’t ready for it. She died in 1944 and wasn’t first seriously exhibited until 1986.) Af Klint’s most celebrated series -- The Paintings for the Temple (1906–1915) – includes 193 paintings, many monumental in scale, which she claimed were created through spiritual guidance from higher beings called the “High Masters.” While she focused largely on geometric forms (circles, spirals, and grids) she did employ organic motifs (flowers, shells, and cellular forms) to represent spiritual evolution, the structure of the cosmos, and dualities like male/female, material/spiritual.

Hilma af Klint, Serenity of the Evening, oil on canvas, 80 x 105 cm, 1907

While I was familiar with her abstracts, I had no idea what an impressive landscape painter Af Klint was earlier in her career. Two of her landscapes are included in the Northern Lights exhibit: Serenity of the Evening (above) and Sunrise (below), both from 1907.  The first shows a boreal forest at sunset, with fir and birch trees in the foreground. There are some bright patches of color and the glowing light of a sunset, but mostly the piece conveys the feeling of subdued peace. According to the exhibit label, these paintings  were inspired by spiritualist séances, which she had participated in since her youth. Af Klint was a member of Sweden's Theosophical Society and was fascinated by anthroposophy, an early twentieth century philosophical movement that theorizes an objective, accessible, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world.

Hilma af Klint, Sunrise, oil on canvas, 1530 × 960 cm, 1907

The other female artist whose artwork caught my eye was the Canadian painter Emily Carr, whose work I hadn’t seen in person before. Carr’s early work focused on documenting Indigenous people, and their totem poles, and it was Lawren Harris who encouraged her to make the shift to the Canadian landscape.

Her personal story is entertaining. Carr ran a boarding house in  Victoria, British Columbia, called The House of All Sorts to support herself financially between painting trips. She was famously eccentric and shared her home with a menagerie of animals, including parrots, dogs, cats, and a monkey named Woo. Carr sometimes took walks with Woo perched on her shoulder. Woo had a habit of biting guests and tearing at Carr’s artwork, leading Carr to keep her in a kind of improvised harness or cage at times.

Emily Carr, Forest Landscape, oil on paper mounted to board, ca. 1935

But back to the art…Forest Landscape isn’t my color palette at all, but is typical of Carr’s late forest palette — deep greens, ochres, and earthy browns, with light breaking through in blue or pale yellow highlights to suggest spiritual illumination filtering through the canopy. While there are tall vertical forms, the energetic brushwork in the foliage is where all the undulating action is. The swirling strokes of thinned oil paint read like calligraphic gestures.

These seven paintings are just my personal favorites among the 71 landscapes in the Northern Lights show. I highly recommend a visit to this exhibit, where you will no doubt find others of interest to you. If you do visit, I’d love to hear which paintings spoke the most to you!

In a future blog post, I’ll share my favorites from this museum’s permanent collection.