About this work
In this intimate study, Astrup turns his modernist eye toward a humble garden plant—rhubarb stalks rendered with the same intensity he lavished on Norwegian fjords and folklore rituals. The composition likely features the plant's characteristic broad leaves and thick, crimson-tinged stems, caught in strong light that emphasizes their sculptural form. Astrup's palette here strips away unnecessary detail; the vegetation emerges through bold color contrasts and clean lines influenced by his admiration for Japanese woodblock prints. There's nothing quaint or merely decorative in this rendering. The rhubarb becomes monumental, its domestic ordinariness transformed through an expressionist lens into something commanding and strange.
This work sits squarely within Astrup's project of finding the extraordinary in rural Norwegian life. Having spent his entire adult life in Jølster, he developed an almost anthropological reverence for the landscape and its working people—the gardens, tools, and seasonal plants that sustained mountain communities. Where many artists of his generation looked to cities for modernist innovation, Astrup mined his village surroundings, discovering abstraction and intensity in what lay closest at hand. *Rhubarb* exemplifies this conviction: the subject is utterly local, yet its treatment rivals any avant-garde still life of the period.
This print belongs in rooms where careful observation is valued—studies, kitchens, spaces where both art and living happen. It appeals to viewers drawn to plainness transformed through attention, to those who recognize that true modernism needn't abandon the quotidian world. Hung near natural light, it radiates a quiet but unmistakable vitality.
