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paintings have a harmony that reflects the artist's practice of
painting out in the landscape, often while a taxi waited patiently
for him a respectable distance away. Kjarval's volcanic subject-
matter was not the violently exploding beast in the distance,
but the cooled and cold rocky buckling lava that covers much of
Iceland. 'All nature is a single symphony, all of it music', he wrote
in 1954. 'You are so receptive to music out in the lava field.'
Gudmundur Einarsson studied at Stefan Eiriksson's school of
art in Reykjavík, and with Ríkardur Jónsson and Thorarinn Thor-
laksson, from 1911 to 1913. He moved on to study in Copenhagen
and Munich. His
Eruption of Grimsvotn
(1934) is as viscerally
shocking as Kjarval's reflective landscapes of eruptive aftermath
are calm and regenerative. Using forms derived from Vorticism,
and indeed also from the nineteenth-century German Romantic
painter Caspar David Friedrich, Einarsson conveys with sharp
diagonals and searing colour the sudden, destructive and over-
whelming scream of the mountain as it explodes into smoke and
fragments. Einarsson had experienced Icelandic volcanoes at first
hand, being a pioneer of mountaineering, and the director of a
film on the 1946 eruption of Hekla.¹² The chaos he evokes in
his Grimsvotn painting is tightly controlled as he releases the
fury of the earth in fire and billowing smoke. The softness of the
smoke contrasts with the sharpness of the flame, and uncannily
prefigures the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion, eleven
years before the world first saw such a thing. But the world did
have the opportunity of seeing this painting some time before
Icelandic art became more widely known, as it was exhibited at
the Minnesota State Fair in 1940.
Twentieth-century Icelandic painters were just as important
as pioneers in the subject of volcanoes as were European artists
such as Volaire and Wright in the late eighteenth century. The
latter encountered the erupting Vesuvius from the historical back-
ground of the picturesque and the Rococo, styles of charm and
wit but of little emotional charge. Suddenly grasping the volcano's
mysterious power, they produced images that defined their sub-
ject for a century, and indeed continue to do so. By contrast,
Ásgrímur Jónsson, Gudmundur Einarsson, Johannes Kjarval
