Nordic artist monographs: where to start
Six monographs on the great Nordic painters, from Hammershøi's silent rooms to af Klint's radiant abstractions. Where to start when one artist asks for a closer look.
Our Nordic art and design books guide took the wide view: one shelf, the whole tradition. This piece goes the other way. A monograph asks you to sit with a single artist until you start seeing the world the way they did, and the Nordic painters repay that patience better than most. Here are six worth living with.
Famous Danish and Norwegian painters: four monographs
Vilhelm Hammershøi: Silence (Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2024). A slim recent way in to the quietest painter in the North: 106 pages built around eighteen works, all from private collections and some barely exhibited before, with essays by Felix Krämer and Florian Illies. Don't go to it for a full career survey. Go to it for the grey Copenhagen rooms, the closed doors, the figure turned away at the window. On Amazon.
Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream by Sue Prideaux (Yale University Press). Not a picture book but a proper biography, written with access to Munch's own letters and diaries, and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Once you know what the paintings cost him, you never look at them the same way again. On Amazon.
Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2019). The catalogue from Sohlberg's first major UK exhibition, made with the National Museum in Oslo and built around Winter Night in the Mountains, the painting at the top of this page, which won NRK's 1995 public vote for Norway's national painting. Out of print, so hunt it down secondhand. Worth the effort.
Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway (Yale University Press, 2021). Edited by MaryAnne Stevens, with a prelude by Karl Ove Knausgård. Astrup painted western Norway as somewhere half real and half remembered: midsummer bonfires, marsh marigold meadows, the garden he planted himself. Colour that still looks radical a century on. On Amazon.
Scandinavian women painters: Backer and af Klint
Both of these had to wait. Backer for a retrospective worthy of her, af Klint for an audience at all.
Harriet Backer: Every Atom is Colour (Hirmer, 2023). The catalogue of the retrospective that travelled from Oslo to Stockholm, Paris and Bergen. Backer painted interiors like Hammershøi did, but where he drains the colour away she pours it in, lamplight and blue shadow and all. Long overdue, and beautifully made. On Amazon.
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (Guggenheim, 2018). The book of the New York show that became the most visited in the Guggenheim's history. Af Klint was painting vast, radiant abstractions years before Kandinsky, then asked for them to be kept from view for twenty years after her death. If abstraction is your way in, this is the one. On Amazon.
Which Scandinavian painters book should you start with?
If you're only buying one, make it the Munch. Prideaux's biography is the book that changes how you read everything else here, because it puts a life behind the pictures instead of more pictures. If it's colour and reproduction you're after, Astrup and Backer give you far more to look at for the money. And if the Hammershøi is what tempts you, know what you're getting: a beautiful exhibition book, not a career.
A monograph does one thing a survey never will: it teaches you what you actually like. The six painters above worked a century ago, and if you'd rather read about the ones working right now, that's the contemporary Nordic art books instalment. The artists behind our prints work in the same northern light as any of them. And if an evening with af Klint leaves you wanting colour of your own on the wall, our abstract prints are a good place to start looking.
