About this work
The catalogue raisonné data from nikolai-astrup.no gives me firm facts: *Chasing the Village Idiot* is a **woodcut** (tresnitt) from **1917**, measuring **358 × 360 mm**, held at **Astruptunet** (now Sunnfjord municipality). Its listed subject tags are **Farmhouse · Lake · Man · Woman**, and it was printed in an edition of 290 impressions plus 10 artist's proofs, printed by Kristian Tysken. The composition is square and the block is keyed on one side. I have enough grounded detail to write a specific, accurate description.
*Chasing the Village Idiot* is a color woodcut made in 1917, measuring a near-perfect square at 358 × 360 mm. The title alone signals Astrup's willingness to press into the uncomfortable edges of rural life — the community sport of ridicule, the village outcast in full flight — rather than retreating to the picturesque. The composition resolves around the familiar poles of Astrup's Jølster world: a farmhouse, a lake, a man, a woman — figures embedded in a landscape that is at once intimate and charged. The scene carries the flattened, almost theatrical spatial logic that defines Astrup's print work: foreground figures and distant water held at the same visual intensity, the eye given no easy recession into depth. Drawing on the compositional logic of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, Astrup blended flat decorative patterning with spatial depth, using asymmetry and rhythmic flowing lines to capture the integration of human figures with their environment. The palette, as with all his woodcuts, would have been built up through separately carved blocks, a hybrid process combining elements of ukiyo-e, traditional color woodcuts, hand-colored prints, and monotype — each impression a singular object.
In 1917, Astrup began subscribing to the newly published Danish avant-garde periodical *Klingen*, edited by ceramicist Axel Salto and writer Poul Uttenreitter, which allowed him to stay abreast of international developments in modern art — knowledge that fed directly into his first major exhibition of woodcuts in Kristiania in May 1918. This was a period of creative acceleration and deepening social observation. His art was thematically concerned with mankind's lifelong relationship with the land, rich in paganism and old mythology that opposed the repressive Christian culture into which he was born. *Chasing the Village Idiot* fits squarely within that preoccupation — a work that frames rural cruelty with the same unflinching eye he brought to pagan ritual and seasonal toil. Over his lifetime, Astrup produced just 52 woodcuts , making each one a considered, hard-won object; his prints were never issued as uniform editions and, like his paintings, were often produced over long periods of time.
