Northern Lights: A Celebration of Northern Landscapes

Northern Lights features sixty-two landscape paintings by artists from Scandinavia and Canada created between 1880 and 1930, among them masterpieces by Edvard Munch and Hilma af Klint. The boreal forest—a global belt of evergreen forests that hugs the Arctic Circle—was a shared source of inspiration for a new kind of modernist painting. The Northern region’s seemingly boundless expanses of forest, the radiant light of endless summer days, the long winter nights, and natural phenomena such as the aurora borealis gave rise to a specifically Nordic form of modern painting whose appeal and fascination endures to this day. In the works on view, the boreal forest, one of Earth’s largest primeval forests, takes on the quality of a spiritual landscape.