Nordic noir. Wasn’t that a genre that had people abuzz back in the 00s? Its revival by the British Museum’s prints and drawings department as a title for an exhibition of modern and contemporary Scandinavian graphic art seems desperate. Forget our oldies like Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci – we’re all about new stuff by hot young Scandi artists! Maybe it’s understandable; after all the National Gallery is also moving in on modern art. But Nordic Noir shows just how far overeager neophilia can go wrong. A museum that specialises in history has gone fishing in contemporary waters and, like a lonely angler on an Arctic lake, has come up with absolutely nothing.
The big surprise is that most of the works here are not on loan. The British Museum owns them. It has “acquired” 400 examples of Nordic graphics with the support of the AKO Foundation. What’s that? It’s the cultural arm of AKO Capital, “one of Europe’s leading investment partnerships” managing “approximately $20.3bn across long-only and long-short equity funds”.
Bland print … The Fallow Deer, 2016, by Mamma Andersson. Photograph: Reproduced by permission of the artist/The Trustees of the British Museum
Why is the museum working with this foundation to bring us a pile of so-so Scandinavian “modern” art? It’s funny how these long-short funds never apply caution to buying art. A lot of the newest works in this show will, by the law of averages, lose all interest for later generations or quite possibly this generation in a couple of years. In fact they might not have any interest now. But the British Museum has taken on a duty to preserve them for ever, like all its treasures.
Like a second-rate corporate art collection, it’s the name of the celebrity artist that counts in some cases, not the work. Ragnar Kjartansson’s woodcut of a yellow and orange flame is pretty cool, right? No, it’s dull as ditchwater. An Olafur Eliasson is better, but not in the least noir. Mamma Andersson is touted as a star but her bland print of a fallow deer could be a decoration from Ikea.
The exhibition’s thesis does not hold water, not even frozen fjord water. It starts with the great Norwegian symbolist Edvard Munch and posits some continuity in woodcuts, watercolours, screenprints and sketches from his masterpieces to today. This is like saying British art now is in the tradition of Aubrey Beardsley. There may be overlaps but they are random and irrelevant compared with the differences of intent, audience and, let’s not forget, quality.
Nicely cut … Suopan (Lasso), c.1928-34, by John Savio. Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum
If the exhibition had no Munch works, its glib claim of continuity between his self-evisceration and the rest might be unthinkingly accepted. Perhaps realising the danger, the curators include only two of his prints. They are devastating. His 1902 colour woodcut Melancholy III depicts a man in black, brooding by a black fjord, under a near-black sky. For a moment the exhibition looks like it might live up to this cracking start. Prints by Munch’s Norwegian Sámi contemporary John Savio show life in the Arctic north – not in Munch’s league, but nicely cut. Henrik Finne depicts the flensing of a whale with hard-edged objectivity. The thick, dark ink coolly delineates men going at the great carcass with shovels.
But soon you start to wonder, what is this about? None of the artists rival Munch and there is precious little of his soulfulness on show. It all falls apart when abstract prints that are obviously derivative from Malevich and Klee lead to screenprints mourning Che Guevara and what may as well be designs for the film Troll Hunter.
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Eyes of hate … My Mother, 2019, by Vanessa Baird. Photograph: Reproduced by permission of the artist/The Trustees of the British Museum
A few compelling abominations lurk in the shadows. Vanessa Baird’s big scary watercolours dig into appalling personal stuff. Her work My Mother is a wizened figure with eyes of hate. In another, an apparent self-portrait, her severed head screams above what looks like her mother’s corpse. Equally worrying is Sverre Malling’s hyperrealistic drawing of a possibly maniacal man holding a severed horse’s head. If the entire show attempted to sustain this genuinely noir spirit it might have worked.
Even so it seems premature for the British Museum to collect these artists. Baird and Malling are both striking, but are they so good that the museum, that is the nation, needs to own their work? As a show this is insipid, but as an addition to a great museum’s collections it is baffling.
