The artists associated with the Norwegian romantic nationalist movement in the mid 19th century holds a privileged place in the art historical canon in Norway. Paintings by artists such as Johannes Flintoe, J.C Dahl, Hans Gude and Adolph Tidemand were not only central to the construction of the idea of a specific Norwegian landscape, history, and cultural identity in the wake of what Henrik Ibsen termed the “400-year night” of Danish rule. Even today, these works keep being imbued with national importance in exhibitions, museum displays, and art historical scholarship, as seen, for instance, in the 2008 exhibition Oppdagelsen av fjellet (Discovering the Mountains) at the National Museum in Oslo, that addressed how the artistic ‘discovery’ of the Norwegian mountainous regions in the 19th century was linked to the cartographic and scientific efforts to chart and control the so-called ‘blank spots’ on the map of Norway.
In this paper I seek to scrutinize this relationship between Norwegian art history and nation building, by questioning what has had to be forgotten and ignored in order to make this canonized and celebrated story of Norwegian art to work. Drawing on the important research undertaken by the Sámi-Norwegian artist Sissel M. Bergh on the structural erasure of southern Sámi language and history by Norwegian scholars and scientists in the nineteenth century, I argue that we need to examine more in-depth the relationship between the romantic nationalist artistic movement’s involvement in creating the image of Norway and the political program of forced assimilation of the indigenous Sámi population known as the process of “Norwegianization” that was developed and put in motion at the same time. Thinking with and alongside Bergh’s video installation Dalvedh (2014), that engages with the instrumental role that historians such as P.A. Munch had in erasing Sámi presence from the new histories of Norway, I suggest the need to query the role of Norwegian art history in the still ongoing settler colonial practice of replacement and dispossession of the Sámi. Refuting the colonial logics implied in the narrative of the artistic ‘discovery’ of the Norwegian mountains, I ask whether Norwegian national romantic paintings instead represent a racialization of landscape in the form of a normalization and naturalization of a settler colonial gaze.