Portrait of the Norwegian Keeper of National Antiquities, Christopher Brinckmann 1904

Here we have Henrik Lund’s ‘Portrait of the Norwegian Keeper of National Antiquities, Christopher Brinckmann’, painted with oil on canvas. It’s all in black and white which sets the mood. The mark making feels very active and not precise. The way the paint is applied you can tell this was a process; it’s about the act of painting. Look at the way the brushstrokes move, especially in the jacket, they seem to give volume to the form but also to flatten the pictorial space. See how the paint is layered, thick in some areas and thinner in others. It almost looks like you could reach out and touch it. The whole thing has a wonderful sense of physicality, as if the painting itself is a kind of object in the world. I keep coming back to that jacket; it’s so energetic and alive. Lund was working around the same time as artists like Kirchner, who were part of Die Brücke, the German Expressionist group. It makes you wonder if they ever crossed paths or influenced each other. Art’s just an ongoing conversation.