"I was walking along a path with two friends, the sun was setting, suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and
leaned on the fence. There was blood and tongues of fire above the
blue/black fjord and the city. My friends walked on and I stood there
trembling with anxiety, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through
nature" - Edvard Munch.
Edvard Munch - The Scream (1893)
Andrew Graham Dixon's BBC4 documentary The Art of Scandinavia takes in thousands of years of art, theatre, architecture, and design and spans three different countries (Denmark, Sweden, and Norway) but it begins, of course it does, with possibly the most famous painting ever made by a Scandinavian, one of the most famous paintings ever.
Edvard Munch's The Scream is a globally recognised symbol of horror that reflects both personal melancholy and a more general anxiety about the human condition. It was made, as you will have gathered from the quote above, following an evening walk in Oslo that Munch took with friends. Though many of us will understand both the painting and the sentiment could the work also, somehow, speak of the place from which its creator came? An edgy image created on the edge of Europe. A remote, sparsely populated, and cold place at the edge of Europe.
In episode one of The Art of Scandinavia, Dark Night of the Soul, AGD asks if Norwegian character, and the artistic expression of that character, can be forged from its climate.The Vikings took a dark apocalyptic view of the world yet it wasn't an entirely nihilistic one. They fashioned exquisite bronze, iron, wood, and gold objects depicting scenes from Norse mythology and their greatest technological achievement was the viking ship. The Gokstad ship was discovered in a burial mound in Vestfold in 1880, already approximately one thousand years old.
The Gokstad Ship (9c)
Borgund Stave Church (c.1200)
Though the Vikings had sailed all the way to
America by the end of the eleventh century the invaders themselves had become the invaded and Christianity had taken hold in Norway. Churches appeared but they had a very specific look. Higgledy-piggledy and adorned with dragons as well as crosses as if to show a syncretic mix of Norse legend with Christianity.
Christianity saw the end of the era of Viking raids, invasions, and incursions but the truth was that most Norwegians had never really been Vikings. The vast majority of them were farmers and fishermen leading harsh, simple, and artless lives. Survival being more of a priority than creativity, understandably.
In the mid-1500s religious reformation swept across Norway as Denmark, then in charge of Norway, imposed Protestantism on the Norwegian people. These Lutherans had little in the way of imagery and the churches they built neither had dragons nor did they have stained glass. Instead they had clear windows so that worshippers could have an unimpeded view of God's work, of nature.
In 1555, Olaus Magnus the Swedish writer, cartographer, and Catholic ecclesiastic produced a book titled Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus - or a Description of the Northern Peoples - in which he wrote about, and drew pictures of, Norway and the Norwegians. Magnus was the first author anywhere to write about snowflakes but he also covered sea serpents, hapless mariners, and the frozen surf.
Olaus Magnus - Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1550)
Olaus Magnus - Carta Marina (1539)
His aim was not simply to educate but to try to provoke the Pope to retake Scandinavia and make it Catholic again and like many of a religious persuasion
his relationship with the truth was casual. Magnus' map, Carta Marina, was geographically accurate but full of dangerous, fantastical, and non-existent beasts.
In the late eighteenth century travellers began to arrive in Norway from
England and Germany to discover not these made up animals but the very real and genuinely awesome and sublime landscapes. Artists among them were inspired to paint scenes of 'frigid desolation' and writers too wrote of the dangers and horrors of being exposed to this unforgiving terrain and climate.
AGD, in reference to Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe's The Maelstrom, jokes that there are "so many ways to die" in Scandinavia but while the visitors were projecting their gothic horror fantasies on to the region the Norwegians who lived there were genuinely suffering in abject poverty.
So perhaps it's hardly a surprise that no named Norwegian artist appears in the history of Norwegian art until Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857). He'd studied in Denmark and Germany, Norway had no universities or art schools, but his paintings were inspired by his memories of the contours of the Norwegian landscape.
Johan Christian Dahl - Shipwreck on the Coast of Norway (1832)
Johan Christian Dahl - Winter at the Sognefjord (1827)
Johan Christian Dahl - Lyshornet near Bergen (1836)
Johan Christian Dahl - View from Stalheim (1842)
Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars - in 1815 - Norway was freed from Danish rule but almost immediately the Swedish took over. This taste of freedom so cruelly taken away resulted in a surge of Norwegian patriotic feeling and a group of painters, perhaps inspired by Dahl's evocative and powerful images, sought to capture not just the beauty of the Norwegian landscape but the customs of the Norwegian people too.
To be able to do this with accuracy Norwegian painters needed to travel and that meant they had to wear furs and ski. To be an artist in 19c Norway you also needed to be an explorer. These brave and romantic nationalists (romantic nationalists? who'd have thought it?) chose as their subject bucolic peasants, loggers, and fjords.
But romanticising poverty stricken lives didn't help people living those lives. In 1868, a famine saw hundreds of thousands of Norwegians leave Norway and many rural folk migrated from their villages to the larger cities. In the case of some villages, their populations were halved and it was Peder Balke (1804-1887) who charted Norway's emptiness, and its extremeness.
Peder Balke - Gaustatoppen (c.1858)
Peder Balke - Lighthouse on the Norwegian Coast (c.1860)
Peder Balke - Vardohus Fortress (c.1870)
Balke's sparse, pared down, works won't shock our modern eyes, and in the wake of
Turner would not have rankled even in Victorian times in
England, but they were too daring, too desolate, and too bleak for contemporary Norwegian taste. Many Norwegians, it seems, did not want to be reminded of how difficult their life was but Balke was an activist and a trade unionist as well as an artist, we'd call him a social justice warrior today, and he felt it was his duty to be honest to his people about where Norway was and where it was going.
He gushed at the beauty of the Aurora Borealis but, at the same time, he knew lives were hard in Norway and he wanted that to change for the better. But, even more than Balke, the artist who most embodied Norway's dislocation with its past was a hypersensitive young man doomed to obscurity by the name of Lars Hertevig (1830-1902).
Hertevig began by painting charming if unremarkable landscapes but at the age of 23 he moved to Dusseldorf to study. It didn't go well for him. He fell in love but the object of his affection was party to a cruel practical joke played on the young man which was a factor in the depression he was soon to suffer. Arriving back in Norway he was sent to the country's first
'lunatic' asylum in Gaustad where he was labelled 'incurably insane'.
Then - he painted again. But this time the results were very different. Still recognisably landscapes but strange, extraordinary, and almost haunted landscapes. There was nothing patriotic or rabble rousing about Hertevig's work. Art which seemed to recognise that as surely as physical existence in Norway was changing so was the landscape of the mind.
Lars Hertevig - The Tarn (1865)
Lars Hertevig - Skogtjern (1865)
Lars Hertevig - Old Pine Trees (1865)
Faith was being shaken. The Danish philosopher
Soren Kierkegaard, a Christian, embarked on a line of thinking and self-questioning that eventually led to an
existential crisis as Kierkegaard became overtaken with
doubt and anxiety:- "the greatest despair is that of not knowing who you are" he claimed from what sounds like his own personal hellscape.
Friedrich Nietzsche hardened Kierkegaard's ideas into outright
atheism and the playwright Henrik Ibsen was another to scratch beneath the surface of polite and respectable life and discover taboo subjects like rape, incest, and suicide. Less outrageous perhaps, Ibsen's main concept was to show how social convention crushes individual hopes and dreams.
In Ibsen's plays it is not uncommon for his characters to simply disappear or die purely to escape the ongoing misery of life. Ibsen left Norway for thirty years of life and when he returned he befriended Edvard Munch, nearly forty years his junior, and what Ibsen put into words Munch managed to depict in paint:- parables for a Godless age.
Edvard Munch - Henrik Ibsen at the Grand Cafe (1874)
Edvard Munch - The Frieze of Life (1902)
Edvard Munch - The Dance of Life (1809)
Edvard Munch - Jealousy (1895)
Once Upon A Time In Denmark, the second part of AGD's Scandinavian journey, begins in a far more joyful place than Munch's melancholic and bleak fjord. Copenhagen's elegant theme park, Tivoli Gardens, features a ride based on Hans Christian Andersen 's dark fairytales. Andersen will bookend the Danish episode as surely as Munch did the Norwegian one.
Is Denmark, like Andersen's famous creation, the ugly duckling that longed to become a swan. The ambitious and grand Frederiksborg Castle in Hillerod was built by King Christian IV of Denmark and was inspired by the
renaissance and baroque palaces of more powerful European nations but its intention to stand as a proud monument to Danish creativity and craftsmanship was undermined by the fact it was built by German and Dutch workers.
Denmark's humble population at the time consisted of 99% farmers and it's unlikely they were interested in or impressed by Frederiksborg Castle's miles of corridors, royal portraits, and its ballroom the size of a
football pitch which, like the rest of the edifice, strained under the weight of all its gold.
Frederiksborg Castle (17c)
Christian IV was both an intellectual and a potent lover (he had two wives and many more mistresses - his first wife died after giving birth to seven children in nine years and his second spouse knocked eleven sprogs out in thirteen years before being banished for committing adultery with a German count) but he was the ruler of a small nation and wanted to look big on the world stage.
He built an astronomical tower, the Rundetaarn, in the heart of Copenhagen. The spiral ramp of which was so wide that Christian would ascend the tower on horseback and from its top he would chart the stars in order to navigate the world's seas and to send his army out to occupy and colonise other nations.
But it never happened. A Danish Empire never came into being and Denmark did not become a global power. Instead the country 'fell into a deep sleep' for one hundred and fifty years at the end of which it was woken by the child of a poor shoemaker - Hans Christian Andersen.
This, necessarily, is a potted history and it seems unlikely that a century and a half passed without anything of note happening in Denmark but let's go with AGD, he's good at this stuff. He turns the history of nations and the history of art into a story with a compelling narrative and if lopping off fifteen decades helps him to do that then I'm not complaining.
Hans Christian Andersen had grown up in a one bedroom house but his mother washed clothes for the king so he'd spent some of his youth playing with princes and he'd read Shakespeare and Schiller but he'd rarely seen any art and grew into an anxious and melancholic, can you spot a Scandinavian theme yet?, bachelor.
Hans Christian Andersen - Thumbelina (1835)
Hans Christian Andersen - The Princess and the Pea (1835)
Hans Christian Andersen - The Ugly Duckling (1843)
Yet these much loved books made Andersen the beating heart of Denmark. The brain of Denmark, however, belonged to a humble priest who preached education for all. Nikolaj Grundtvig (1783-1872) founded the Danish Society and gave lectures on Danish art, Danish architecture, and Danish history. Grundtvig and Andersen, unlike Christian IV, weren't trying to increase Denmark's empire but to increase the knowledge and wellbeing of the Danish people.
A university was founded for all Danes and Danish society shifted away from being a monarch led kingdom and towards one where decisions were made by ordinary citizens. One of those ordinary citizens, Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), became a successful, famous, and rich sculptor in
Rome, he carved the head of Lord Byron as Childe Harold, and when he returned to Denmark he brought classicism with him and it was soon incorporated into Scandinavian art.
Bertel Thorvaldsen - Lord Byron (1831)
Bertel Thorvaldsen - Jason with the Golden Fleece (1803-1828)
Jason with the Golden Fleece was considered his masterpiece. While Thorvaldson sculpted celebrities or figures from antiquity and myth, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg painted the ordinary Danish people. But he also made cigar boxes with hidden, and extremely explicit, erotica and memorable images of
naked men and women. Men and women with realistic looking
'bits'.
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg - Bella and Hanna. The Eldest Daughters Of M.L.Nathanson (1820)
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg - Anna Maria Magnani (19c)
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg - Cigar Box (19c)
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg - Male Model Holding A Staff (1837)
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg - Standing Female Model With A Green Background (1837)
Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann - Mother Denmark (1851)
The jingoistic side of the Danish soul fought back against this move towards introspection and reality. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann's Mother Denmark shows the Nordic heroine ready to march off to win new territories for Denmark, to expand its almost non-existent empire, and to, no doubt, find those elusive sunlit uplands.
It was, of course, yet another illusion. In 1864 the Second Schleswig War saw Denmark fight both the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire over control of the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenberg. An ill advised national venture built from the deadly seeds of exceptionalism that resulted, predictably, in a bloody, crushing, and nationally scarring defeat and nearly three thousand Danish deaths (according to Wikipedia) or, by AGD's account, over eight thousand boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two (and in two hours to boot)!
Either way, the course of Danish history was altered as a result. Denmark learned that instead of aggressively trying to expand it should, instead, develop as a small country. Countries, like humans, sometimes have to learn to accept, to come to love, the body they're born with.
The initially uneasy new spirit of Denmark was captured best by Vilhelm Hammershoi, a contemporary of Ibsen and Munch. Hammershoi, for the most part, shrank the world to the size of the room. Some of his sitters aren't even facing the artist and some of the rooms, before
Edward Hopper would repeat the trick, show not just an absence of expression but the emptiness of a room once a person has a left with a suggestion, however, that in some way their presence still lingers.
Vilhelm Hammershoi - Interior With Young Woman Seen From The Back (1904)
Vilhelm Hammershoi - Interior With Young Man Reading (1898)
Vilhelm Hammershoi - Amalienborg Square, Copenhagen (1896)
Vilhelm Hammershoi - Dust Motes (1900)
These are not just interiors of buildings but interiors of the soul also. Denmark had embarked on a period of soul searching which only continued when Denmark, neutral at the onset of World War II, was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. Hammershoi had started the process of seeking solace in the small but its ultimate destination arrived in the invention, in 1949 - following the removal of the Nazi occupiers, the Lego brick.
Lego, as well as tasteful furniture (affordable, practical yet modern and beautiful like Arne Jacobsen's chair) and the concept of 'hygge' (a loose idea of celebrating all that is intimate, cosy, and comfortable) became the way in which Denmark would present its identity to the modern world and, AGD believes, it finds its most complete articulation in Copenhagen's Grundtvig Church. Six million bricks put together to create a thing of Danish beauty. A brick expressionist cathedral to high idealism. Holy Lego!
Lego
Lego
Arne Jacobsen - Series 7 chair
Arne Jacobsen - AJ52 Society Table
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klimt - Grundtvig's Memorial Church (1927-1940)
The third and final episode of The Art of Scandinavia, Democratic by Design, is given over, of course, to Sweden and it begins with the raising of the Vasa warship in 1961. Now housed in a maritime museum in Stockholm, the Vasa sank on her maiden voyage in 1628 with the loss of thirty lives. As with the story of the Danish nation, it was testament to the folly of an idea that Sweden could, and would, form an empire to rival those of France, Spain, and Great Britain.
The sinking of the Vasa punctured these ambitions and Sweden went, for some time - again like Denmark, into the doldrums. The Industrial Revolution arrived late in the country but when it did Sweden used it to make their nation, even their monarchy, a progressive one.
Vasa (1626-1628)
Drottningholm Palace (16c)
The Swedish royal family were alive to the winds of change and the demands of democracy and one prince, Prince Eugen - the red prince, even became an artist and an art collector. A patron of very homoerotic art and a collector of works by Anders Zorn who, unlike the prince, seemed to prefer women. Women and idyllic pastoral scenes.
The Red Prince himself may have collected paintings of bare naked men and bare naked ladies but it was the landscapes he painted, like 1901's Calm Water, that were truly bare. Desolate. Stark. Imbued with a very specific Scandinavian anxiety as so much art from the region has always been.
Anders Zorn - The Duke (1910)
Anders Zorn - Mme Ashley (1920)
Anders Zorn - Woman In A Boat (1917)
Prince Eugen, Duke of Narke - Calm Water (1901)
Richard Bergh - Silence (1893)
Richard Bergh - The Girl And Death (1888)
The paintings of Richard Bergh are as desolate, as haunted, and as death obsessed as those of Edvard Munch and while, in Denmark, Munch had Ibsen as his literary analogue, in Sweden, Bergh had August Strindberg whose work was both supported and funded by Prince Eugen.
Strindberg changed theatre forever with his concept of the 'intimate theatre'. The walls, the ceilings, and the seats were all part of what now we'd probably call an 'immersive experience'. In a sense, Strindberg did away with the barrier between players and audience. Strindberg's theatre wasn't a place you went to be entertained. It was a place you went to have your life changed.
The dreamlike narratives and the deep and volatile characters of Strindberg's work (Miss Julie, The Dance Of Death, The Ghost Sonata) were echoed in paintings he made that reflected his own turbulent life:- three marriages, boozing, trials for obscenity and blasphemy.
August Strindberg - The Town (1903)
Strindberg struggled with the fast pace of modern life (wonder what he'd have made of 2020/2021!) and if a modernist uncomfortable with modernity sounds, initially, like a contradiction it's really not. There are many of us who weld our notions of self to progressive and even radical ideas yet still feel like we have one foot, willingly or otherwise, stuck in the past. Strindberg's contradictory nature didn't devalue his modernist aesthetic but was, in fact, inbuilt in the very nature of it.
August Strindberg died in 1912, aged 63, two years before the onset of World War I in which Sweden did not participate and that neutrality, less understandably, was maintained during World War II in which Sweden allowed the Wehrmacht to use its railways to transport personnel and materiel from Norway to Finland but also accepted Jewish refugees from Denmark and Norway.
The Swedish art from the post-war era, therefore, is not shot through with the trauma of contemporary art made in Germany and Italy. It was a more benign art. Gosta Adrian-Nilsson, under the name GAN, made non-threatening sculptures and Swedish accented fauvist paintings. Similar paintings were produced by Isaac Grunewald and his wife Sigrid Hjerten
GAN - Akrobater (1923)
Isaac Grunewald - The Crane (1915)
Sigrid Hjerten - Ateljeinterior (1916)
Hjerten's paintings have an interesting proto feminist dimension and both GAN's and Grunewald's works are not without charm and skill but they're not, AGD tells us, exactly world beating. But Swedish design and architecture of the era undoubtedly was - and the quiet revolution in Swedish design all began with an argument about furniture.
The 1930 Stockholm Exhibition was a showcase for competing styles of design that, in a country with a population of six million, attracted four million visitors. It could be said that the winning style of design was that of Functionalism. It showed how to reimagine society via design, streamlining, and cutting out ornamentation to arrive at a new, and modern, idea of beauty, a new value system, and a new, and better, world.
It was design as a field of morality, it was intellectual hygiene, and, even now, many of the ideas behind Functionalism seem wildly original. In thirties Sweden, unlike elsewhere, industry flourished due to good relations between the bosses and the workers and, in 1932, the Social Democratic government of Per Albin Hansson built modern houses for workers in the suburbs of Stockholm.
Hansson compared the Sweden he was hoping, and trying, to build with a simple family home and like all families that work there is far more collaboration than there is competition. In Gothenburg, the chief city planner created entire new districts with orderly, yet elegant, flats stretching out for blocks. They had the simplicity of warehouses yet also the gracefulness of ocean liners - and they proved very popular.
They were, in AGD's words, "the Vasa that didn't sink". The next stage in the Swedish design revolution was the arrival of Ingvar Kamprad's now world-conquering IKEA stores in 1943. The Stockholm store, above, was influenced by the design of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. IKEA may not be, strictly speaking, Functionalist but it is simple. At least until you get home and try to assemble the bloody stuff.
Swedish design drew on traditional peasant houses but made them cleaner and safer. Healthy diet and exercise were also promoted almost as if it was every Swede's duty to look after their bodies as much as they looked after their built environment. Spending time in the sunshine, not always at a premium in Sweden, was encouraged too.
The Spartan simplicity of Arne Jacobsen's Landskrona Sports Hall stands as, seemingly, the ultimate representation and triumph of a Utopian society where people treated themselves, their neighbours, their cities, and their bodies as well as they possibly could. Everybody, it seemed on the surface, looked after everybody else and the whole of Swedish society was all the better for it.
But of course there was, there always is, an underbelly and the Scandi-noir literary pioneers Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo wrote about that underbelly in a series of ten Martin Beck detective novels from 1965 to 1975. Sjowall and Wahloo were Marxists who believed Swedish society was completely corrupt and Beck was a symptom of that society.
He smoked, he ate bad food, and he solved very nasty yet very realistic crimes slowly and methodically. In the wake of the Martin Beck novels came a deluge of Scandinavian fiction from writers like Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo and, later, television shows like The Killing and The Bridge that became popular globally.
The Social Democrats eventually lost power in 1975 and their legacy remains a point of debate. Many see modern Sweden as a grimly unequal society where immigrants were welcomed but soon made to feel displaced and second class. It's been reflected in extreme masochistic performance art that tackles the slave trade and FGM.
Makoda Linde's Painful Cake from 2012 screams in pain as you cut parts from it. The scream of pain the cake elicits is not so different as Edvard Munch's primal scream of existential agony on the banks of a Norwegian fjord more than a century earlier. The story of Scandinavian art told of a journey that mostly took place in the interior of our souls but the destination, it seems, does not look all that dissimilar from the point we started at. AGD was a more than capable tour guide on this thrilling and thoughtful journey.
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