A short excerpt from my paper “A Woman in the Far North: Anna Boberg and the Norwegian Glacial Landscape” published in Kunst og Kultur (02/2021):
“In a photograph of the Swedish painter Anna Boberg (1864–1935) she stands before a vast expanse of ice that is the Øksfjordjøkelen (or Øksfjord glacier), her easel in front of her and the mountainous backdrop saturated against the Arctic sky (ill. 1). She is silhouetted against the contrasting grey of the ice, and white of the snow beyond. Jagged ridges of perhaps crystalline blue ice emerge from the depths of the crevasses that shape the glacier as it cascades down the mountain. Rocks and debris are visible among the artistic paraphernalia strewn around the artist. The photograph exemplifies the lengths she went to, to be close to her subject matter. The presence of Northern Norway in Boberg’s oeuvre is incalculable, as her autobiography Envar sitt ödes lekboll (1934) testifies. She first visited the Lofoten Islands in the summer of 1901, and this was the beginning of a thirty-year love affair with the islands. In this essay, however, I digress from her fjord-scapes of the Lofoten fishing communities, that have come to typify her career. Instead I draw attention to Boberg’s en plein air glacial studies from Nordland, Trøms and Finnmark, which place her in conversation with glacial art history and the wider discourse of white, Western women within the Nordic Arctic…”
This paper is available open access and online here.
Isabelle Gapp 