Art & Creativity Quote by Harald Sohlberg

Sohlberg is describing an artistic purge: the landscape, for him, isn’t a catalog of trees and rocks but a pressure that needs a clean outlet. “Free of all the unnecessary details” reads less like minimalism-for-minimalism’s-sake and more like self-defense against realism’s busywork. He’s not rejecting nature; he’s rejecting the idea that fidelity equals truth. The intent is to strip the scene down until what remains can carry weight like architecture: “simple and monumental.” Monumental isn’t about size as much as permanence - a painting that stands there, stubborn and self-contained, the way a mountain or a church does.

The subtext is emotional, even slightly suspicious of emotion’s messiness. Notice how he doesn’t say he’s expressing his feelings; he’s expressing “the emotions that the landscapes have given me.” That phrasing shifts authorship onto the world, as if the terrain is the composer and the painter is the instrument. It also grants him permission to be intense without sounding confessional. Nature becomes both muse and alibi.

Context matters: Sohlberg comes up in a Norway negotiating national identity, modernity, and the inherited pull of Romanticism. His famous nocturnes and winter scenes don’t just depict the North; they stage it as a psychological theater. Simplification becomes a cultural strategy: take a place, remove the clutter of anecdote, and you get an image sturdy enough to feel like destiny. In that sense, his “monumental” simplicity isn’t escape from reality - it’s a bid to make landscape function like memory: edited, charged, unmistakably yours.