American Art Collaborative

At first glance the pines in Winter in Oslo appear to sit atop a monochrome field. Closer inspection reveals that the artist first painted a colorful landscape and then blanketed it with snow, as if in imitation of nature. Along the edges of the trees one can see traces of vibrant green, yellow, blue, and orange, still visible after the white paint was applied over, around, and in between the boughs. (A similar effect can be observed in the view of snow on Oslo rooftops, in the case nearby.) Winter snow offered Langlais a pretext for unifying the surface of the canvas or paper, a tendency that would persist in the ways that he later exploited the properties of wood.