Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “The sun shines at midnight, and it is night at noon . . . the aurora borealis flares among the stars and storm clouds and waves chase each other . . . Fogs almost palpable in their density hide the world away in an instant.” This was Anna Boberg’s account of painting in Norway’s Lofoten Islands in the 1900s. It also describes the elemental, luminous, majestic dramas playing across Northern Lights, a stirring winter show of late 19th and early 20th century landscapes at Basel’s Beyeler Foundation. At the entrance, Munch’s “Children in the Forest” invites you to stand on the fringe of a sunlit wood with six tiny figures, seen from the back, contemplating a frieze of trees rising like giants with mask faces, animal snouts, curling arms, a big boot. Will the children plunge in or shrink back? Eerie as a Hansel-and-Gretel stage set, this was painted in 1901 and claims nature as a mysterious, mythic force, site for psychological as well as physical exploration. All sorts of magical, transporting lights in darkness follow. Bright white trunks entice you deep into Ivan Shishkin’s vast charcoal forest “Wind Fallen Trees” (1888). Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s icy torrent “Mantykoski Waterfall” (1892-94) drips abstract lines of glowing gold; puffy snowdrifts and coloured shadows in his “Lair of the Lynx” (1908), painted after a hunting trip, record midwinter close to Finland’s Karelia region bordering Russia. The border runs through extensive taiga — a landscape of pines, spruce and larches. On one side, Gallen-Kallela, who fought in Finland’s war of independence, sought a distinctive national art. On the other Shishkin, “tsar of the forest”, insisted his epic scenes represented “expanse, space, land . . . God’s grace. Russian wealth.”Harald Sohlberg’s “Country Road” (1916) in blazing midnight sun hangs next to his spectacular “Winter Night in the Mountains” (1901), where the Rondane peaks — backdrop for Ibsen’s and Grieg’s Peer Gynt — glisten in a crepuscular haze. Gazing at the mountain, Sohlberg felt “what a solitary pitiful atom I was in an endless universe,” but also that “I had suddenly awakened in a new, unimagined and inexplicable world.”The pyrotechnics of the Northern Lights are both dazzling motif — Boberg painted them as ghostly turquoise and magenta curtains raining down on the Arctic sea, Tom Thomson as phantom lime-green spires over Ottawa — and metaphor for artists’ imaginative transformations of the boreal forest landscapes in Scandinavia, Russia and Canada. The years between 1880 and 1930 were the northern landscape’s heyday, when geography and politics — a flight from industrialisation to untouched nature, the opening of polar travel, surging romantic nationalism — aligned with aesthetic opportunity as French impressionism and post-impressionism spread globally.The Beyeler has a distinguished record of recalibrating modernism’s story, pulling in the view from the edge, and here illuminates a dozen artists with individual displays. Some, for example Boberg, were never known outside Scandinavia: a Stockholm architect’s wife who strapped easel and frame to her thick fur coat, she painted en plein air with the hardy obsessiveness of Monet, creating vertiginous close-ups such as the translucent, horizonless “Glacial Lake”.Others had international careers, then were forgotten by Paris-centred modern art history. Swede Gustaf Fjaestad’s delicately drifting “Newly Fallen Snow” (1909) and flaming tangle “Frozen Trees at Dusk” (1913), combine meticulous observation with art nouveau ornamental sinuosity and pointillism’s pulsating dots and dashes. They come from storerooms at Vienna’s Belvedere and the Musée d’Orsay — Fjaestad was collected across Europe before the first world war.In 1912-13 an American touring exhibition of Scandinavian art starring Fjaestad and Sohlberg attracted Canadian artists to its Buffalo venue, including wealthy Lawren Harris. He founded and funded Canada’s modernist Group of Seven, and supported two Canadian free spirits, Thomson and Emily Carr. More self-conscious and abstract-leaning than the Europeans, though absorbed in beloved landscapes, the Canadians’ paintings are exhilarating.Carr’s swirling dynamic “Forest, British Columbia” (1931-32), and her vortices of brilliant white paint animating “Inside a Forest” (c1935), “Sunlight in the Woods” (1934), and “Dancing Sunlight” (c1937), set the mind spinning, as if wind tears through the room. An ecowarrior concerned about industrial logging, Carr painted Canada’s Pacific forests from a trailer, using oil paint diluted with gasoline on cheap manila paper in fluid, vital renderings. She can sweepingly simplify — “Abstract Tree Forms” (1931-32), the triangular patterned “Reforestation” (1936) — without letting go of what she called “earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume and I wanted to hear her throb”.Harris too began as a lyricist — “Snow Fantasy” (c1917) with its iridescent laden boughs is a stylised version of Fjaestad’s decorative tapestry of white twigs “Winter Moonlight” (1895) displayed at Buffalo’s 1913 show — before deciding that Canada’s unique topography, “the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment”, demanded different responses. In “Beaver Pond” (1921), trees, foliage, reflections in the swamp are stark and crisp; in “Lake Superior” (1919) and “Mountain Forms” (c1926) stiff summits and black expanses of water become angular flattened shapes, casting metallic gleams — a new crystalline, North American sublime.The most fascinating transatlantic lineage is from Sohlberg’s filmic, noirish “A House by the Coast” (1906), a solitary beach cottage glimpsed through a silhouette of trees, shown on the American tour, and Thomson’s linear, melancholic “Northern River” (1915), an autumnal Algonquin Park landscape and its mirror image in water trembling behind a mesh of trees. A young man’s anxious, captivating painting, it conjures Eliot’s line “as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”, from “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, published the same year.“Northern River” introduced into Thomson’s compositions the distancing devices of lattice work, trellises, grids of trees that significantly influenced painter Peter Doig in the 1990s. Thomson’s “The Canoe” (1914) features another motif adopted by Doig: the white boat lies empty on the shore. From such a vessel Thomson drowned in 1917.For European audiences, Thomson is the Beyeler’s haunting discovery, but even the show’s most famous artist, Munch, surprises here: how sparky the landscapes are in the absence of his doom-laden figures. “White Night” (1900-01) is an insomniac’s vision of jagged sawtooth spruces lining a frozen fjord. In “Starry Night” (1922-24), blue-tinted skies whirl above the enigmatic form of the artist’s shadow. “Train Smoke” (1900) is a ribbon of steam wreathing like a joyful banner around fat trees in full leaf by pools of mauve water. The zany, loosely painted “The Yellow Log” (1912), lying on snow in a purple wood, beams across the central gallery; David Hockney’s depictions of Woldgate’s fallen trees are descendants.It is a tribute to the Beyeler’s fresh selection that contemporary works frequently come to mind. This is a tremendous show, revelatory about painting as a continuum across continents, ideologies and from past and present.Beyeler Foundation, Basel, January 26 — May 25, then Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York, from August
