Dark Night of the Soul Art of Scandinavia

Scandinavia. The Nordic lands.

So far north, they've often been simply left off

the map of world civilisations.

Art, literature, philosophy -

these belonged to the lands of the south.

Of sunshine, warmth, the light of reason.

To the north lay the shadow lands,

the lands of perpetual midnight and darkness.

But that's not the whole story.

Scandinavia is not a single country,

but three neighbouring nations.

Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

Linked by language and a shared Viking past.

The art of Scandinavia reflects their stormy history,

played out in landscapes of forbidding beauty.

Nature's been the great enemy,

but it's also been the great inspiration.

Not just for painting and poetry,

but for architecture and design.

Inspired by the frozen forms of ice,

or dark forests of pine.

You could say the Scandinavian mind itself

has been shaped by nature,

like a landscape formed by a glacier.

Despite their remoteness,

the Nordic peoples have managed to fashion

one of the most remarkable civilisations.

And the art of Scandinavia shares many of the characteristics

of the Scandinavian landscape -

hardness, sharpness, clarity.

I think the north has also given it

some of its most distinctive moral

and psychological characteristics.

Pride, tempered by a sense of living at the margins -

anxiety, loneliness, melancholy.

And blowing through it all, like a cold, piercing wind,

an absolute determination to endure, come what may.

BIRDSONG

'There aren't many images that are better known

'than a certain painting created in Fin-de-siecle Norway.'

The Scream scandalised the public when first exhibited in 1895.

Since then, it's been copied and parodied so often,

even Homer Simpson had his moment of Nordic angst,

that it's become almost a ghost of its former self.

The man who painted it in the first place was certainly a troubled soul.

The Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch.

Munch once morosely declared,

"The angels of fear, sorrow and death

"have stood by my side since the day I was born".

'It's an intriguing paradox,

'that an image expressing such personal melancholy

'should have become such a universal symbol of horror.'

It's one of the world's most famous paintings,

but it was created from not very much -

just the experience of a walk in Oslo one evening.

Munch described it in his diary.

He said he was walking along with a couple of friends

when a red sunset began to fall over the blue-black fjord.

He felt a melancholy run across his soul

and then he felt a piercing, unending scream

going through all of nature itself.

He stopped, his friends carried on.

And that's the moment perpetuated here.

What's the picture really about?

I think it's about the sense of becoming unmoored, untethered,

of feeling all alone in a hostile universe.

The left-hand side of the painting

almost makes sense, in perspective terms.

And that's the straight and narrow side,

along which his two friends continue to walk.

They are still at home in their world,

but he, wheeling to face us,

has become completely uprooted

from any sense of belonging.

He has been whirled around into this confusing mixture of sky and sea.

It's as if the cosmos is sucking him into its great void.

It's a terrifying painting.

It's been universally embraced as one of the great,

defining images of the modern, anxious sense of self.

So much so that it's become almost a cliche.

But how did it come to be created in, of all places, Norway?

'Munch created his famously alienating image

'in a place that is itself on the edge.

'Norway is a land of frozen hostility.

'It's Continental Europe's remotest,

'most sparsely-populated country.'

Almost a third of it lies north of the Arctic Circle.

It's a unique landscape

that has forged a people with their own unique story.

According to the French Enlightenment writer, Montesquieu,

the character and history of every great nation

can be explained by its climate.

Now, it's not the most fashionable of theories these days,

but in the case of Norway,

I really do think he had a point.

It's not hard to imagine how this climate produced

some of the blood-thirstiest warriors in history,

toughened by the bitter winters.

For three centuries, waves of Vikings set forth

to invade Christian lands.

Theirs was a brutal kind of honour,

borne of a place where only the ruthless survive.

It would be wrong to think of them as unsophisticated.

They fashioned exquisite objects from bronze, iron and gold.

They also worked one of nature's more perishable materials, wood,

to create enigmatic images,

thought to be scenes from Norse mythology.

Yet of their way of life, we know very little.

The ancient Scandinavians remain a people shrouded in mystery.

But what we do know of them,

above all, from their great literature, the Norse sagas,

suggests that they took a darkly apocalyptic view of the world

and their place in it.

Haunted, perhaps, by the sense that nothing would last.

Theirs seems a society poised between settlement and nomadism.

And I think it's deeply appropriate

that while we associate the civilisations

of ancient Rome or ancient Greece

with structures like the Coliseum or the Parthenon,

we associate ancient Scandinavia, above all,

with a vessel of travel - the Viking ship.

The ship was the Vikings' greatest technological achievement,

able both to cross oceans

and navigate shallow waters.

It was a symbol of Viking strength that struck awe and terror

into the hearts of all who saw it.

Sometimes it was embellished

with strange, snake-like, gripping beasts,

that suggest a Nordic view of the natural world

as a rather dark, hostile place.

But the intricate details are just part of a structure

that has its own elemental beauty.

This is the Gokstad ship.

It's my favourite of all Viking seagoing vessels,

and it's pure, naked engineering.

It's a fantastic thing.

It's got the abstract beauty

of a perfect piece of modern sculpture.

Its making is itself a kind of miracle.

The Vikings didn't have saws, they only had axes and hammers.

So the ship is made simply by warping the wood,

holding it into place and creating this structure.

It's extraordinary.

It's made by a people who only know two things -

they know wood and they know the sea.

And they've created from wood

a kind of upside-down version of the waves.

So that these ribs,

you can feel how they would cut through the sea,

acting almost as a series of shock absorbers

to each succeeding wave.

When you see something like this, you understand how it was

that the Vikings sailed all the way to America.

By the end of the 11th century, the invaders had become the invaded.

Christianity had finally taken root in the north.

Churches were springing up across the landscape.

Norsemen turned their woodworking skills to a new Christian purpose.

But this was a Christianity far from Rome

and still very close to the ancient Norse gods.

SQUAWKING

I think this brilliantly higgledy-piggledy construction

is one of the most magical buildings perhaps in the whole world.

Coming across it here, in the Norwegian wilderness,

it's almost as if you've stumbled across a building from a fairytale.

Hansel and Gretel's gingerbread house.

But, no, it's a church!

It's more than 800 years old.

Now, it's covered with crosses,

it's a building that brandishes crosses

to every corner of this remote valley.

But it's also still very much a Viking building.

Certainly a Norse building.

Even the very structure of its roof

suggests a kind of Norse closeness to nature.

It's the roof equivalent of a fir cone.

And look at the Viking symbols up there.

Dragons.

An old Norse symbol, the dragon,

which here has been cast in the role

of the medieval gargoyle, or grotesque.

Its function is to ward off evil,

to roar away evil spirits,

keeping the house of God safe.

So this is a building very much in which,

yes, they've converted to Christianity,

but they still hold to their own symbols.

And if you come inside, you can see that mixture even more vividly.

It's just so...romantic.

Almost eerie!

Very, very little is known about

the architectural history of these buildings.

There are so few of them,

and what preceded them has vanished completely.

But it's generally believed that a space like this

would have seemed, to its first community,

very similar to the old, wooden-built, pagan temples

for the worship of the old gods.

I imagine, or I like to think

that the type of mead hall that we find described in Beowulf,

that might also have looked rather like this.

Longer, but with these same arches,

this sense of...oh, just solidity.

It's fantastic!

I think that sense of the building

having roots in the old Norse past

must have perhaps been quite important to the early communities.

That they weren't just being asked completely to embrace

something totally unfamiliar to them.

And almost as a symbol of that, I think, we've got these...

..enigmatic little figures. On that side, you've got what seems to be

some kind of snow cat

and here, very intriguingly,

we've got the impassive face of a man,

or perhaps it's a god.

He has one eye open, one eye shut.

Odin was blind in one eye.

With the coming of Christianity,

Viking raids on the rest of Europe ceased.

In fact, most Norwegians had never gone a-Viking.

Not the name of a people, but a term that meant raiding by sea.

The majority were farmers or fishermen.

'And, given that you could fit Norway's entire medieval population

'into Wembley Stadium,

'it's hardly surprising that for centuries,

'they lived harsh, simple lives,

'barely touched by the outside world.'

Beyond their carved doorframes and window lintels,

they had little time for art.

Their priority was survival.

Then, in the mid 1500s,

a religious reformation swept through the country,

reaching even the remotest places.

Norway was, by then, a colony of its brother nation,

the powerful Danish Empire.

'Denmark imposed the new Protestant faith on its subjects.

'But it was a faith that seemed tailor-made

'for the austere Norwegian way of life.'

The people at large here did not cleave to the old Catholic past.

They were Lutherans.

And that meant that theirs was a faith

which offered them very little in the way of imagery.

Few paintings, few sculptures,

no stained glass.

Just simple church buildings with clear windows,

through which they might gaze at the beauties of their natural landscape.

Which, their preachers taught them to understand,

symbolised the book of God himself.

It was another kind of book, not a Bible,

which would bring news of these remote Protestant societies

to the outside world.

To the church in Rome, heretical Scandinavia

was a place more on the margins than ever.

Dismissed as a land of pagans.

'But one man in the Vatican,

'a Scandinavian priest named Olaus Magnus, made it his mission

'to bring knowledge of the semi-mythical Nordic lands

'to the heart of European civilisation.'

The National Library in Oslo holds a first-edition copy

of his truly extraordinary book.

So here we have it, 1555,

Olaus Magnus' Description of the Northern Peoples.

It's a book in which it's always winter.

It's fantastic for its descriptions

of a territory which, to most Europeans,

seemed forbiddingly remote and unbelievably cold.

Right at the beginning, we find this wonderful illustration

in which we see these diminutive Scandinavians, heavily bearded.

They're wearing heavy caps, furs, boots.

And they seem to be gesticulating towards a sun

that barely struggles above the horizon.

It's followed by a whole chapter on the effects of cold.

A kind of hymn to cold.

"Cold burns the eyes of animals and stiffens their hairs.

"Cold allows fish to be fresh for five or six months without salt.

"Cold allows games and delightful shows to be held on the ice.

"Cold makes the skin peel off one's lips, fingers and nostrils

"if they touch iron."

He's the first writer to talk about the snowflake.

And he says what a wonder it is

that God should have engineered things in such a way

that this tiny thing should always be designed

to have a different pattern.

The wood block print that illustrates the thought...

They're not the most convincing snowflakes in the world,

but they do carry the idea.

You've got these amazing sections

on the wildlife of the Norwegian Sea.

Look at this! HE CHUCKLES

He says traders who come into Norwegian waters

are often inconvenienced by, um...Serpentum.

A huge snake rearing out of frozen waters

to grab a hapless mariner and drag him into the frozen surf.

But why did he write his book,

with its wonderful blend of factual description

and mythological elaboration?

Well, the date is important - 1555.

This is after the Reformation.

So Scandinavia has been converted to the new Protestant faith

and during the height of the counter Reformation.

And Olaus Magnus is part of that.

He is a Swedish Catholic.

And he writes this book

in order to try to persuade the Pope and the cardinals

of all of the splendours, the miracles, the marvels

and the wonders of Scandinavia.

He's saying, retake Scandinavia, make it Catholic once again!

Of course, it never happened.

If the Pope shivered reading the book,

he'd have shuddered to see Olaus Magnus' great map of Scandinavia,

the Carta marina.

It was unprecedented in its accuracy,

yet graphically illustrated with ferocious beasts.

Magnus' work clearly did little for Nordic tourism

because for the next 200 years,

Europeans still saw the far north

as a wild, dangerous place to be avoided.

It wasn't until the late 18th century

that curious travellers from England, France and Germany

began to venture into the more remote parts of Norway.

'Their diaries and letters fuelled a growing romantic fascination

'with sublime landscapes.

'Dramatic, wild places were seen not simply as forbidding,

'but as having an awe-inspiring beauty of their own.'

Artists who had never been beyond the Arctic Circle

were inspired to paint scenes of frigid desolation.

They imagined extreme encounters with nature at her most terrifying.

And writers, too, gripped the public

with their visions of a fictionalised north.

Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein,

climaxes on frozen Arctic wastes.

Edgar Allan Poe's tale, The Maelstrom,

chronicles a hideous encounter

with one of Norway's infamous whirlpools.

In Scandinavia, it seemed,

there were so many ways to die.

'But while foreigners fantasised about the wild north,

'Norwegians themselves struggled with the realities

'of isolation and poverty.

'In this backwards nation of farmers and fishermen,

'cobblers and carpenters, there were no universities,

'let alone art schools or art galleries.

'Becoming an artist must have seemed the remotest of dreams.'

But none of that deterred Johan Christian Dahl.

Son of a poor west coast fisherman, he was destined to become

one of the greatest painters of the Romantic age.

Dahl's early landscapes

convinced a group of well-to-do local merchants

to sponsor his studies in Denmark and Germany.

Though he spent most of his life abroad,

again and again, he would paint the remembered contours of his homeland.

Sometimes, he depicted Norway in the grip of winter,

its ancient monuments standing like proud symbols of endurance.

At other times, he portrayed a green, sunlit land.

Though his is always a pale, watery sun

breaking through clouds of gloom.

He chose to celebrate Norway's rustic simplicity,

as though enshrining the Enlightenment idea of the noble savage.

He saw the nation's undeveloped state as a virtue,

a symbol of its innocence.

This is Johan Christian Dahl's View from Stalheim,

painted in 1842,

towards the end of his life.

A monumental canvas.

I think he intended it as a grand, patriotic statement.

This, to him, represents the essence of what it means to be Norwegian.

But just think for a moment what a huge contrast there is

between this proud, patriotic, Enlightenment Norwegian

and his counterparts, say, in Paris or London.

For an Englishmen at this time, London represents civilisation.

Think of Samuel Johnson.

"A man who's bored of London is bored of life."

To a Frenchman, Paris would be the great symbol of civilisation,

but to a Norwegian, no, it's this!

A fragment of beautiful wilderness,

in which a few huts are huddled.

Animals are being tended,

a river winds its way through these chasms of rocks.

A double rainbow placed at the apex of the wilderness.

I think that's Dahl's symbol of the fact that God,

Protestant God, blesses this land.

But to be Norwegian, essentially, is to be at home in nature.

Dahl's painting might suggest that 19th century Norway

was a kind of untouched, primitive paradise.

In reality, the country was entering a period of profound change.

By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Norway was liberated

from centuries of rule by its big brother Denmark.

A bold democratic constitution

pointed the way to a brave new future.

But to the frustration of many citizens,

Norway quickly found itself under the control of another master -

this time, its other big brother - Sweden.

But the tide of Norwegian nationalism couldn't be stemmed.

A wave of patriotic feeling surged across Norway,

but how to forge a sense of national identity?

How to create symbols around which a people might rally?

Well, that's where art came in.

A group of painters set out to record the beauties

of Norway's most far flung landscapes

and to depict the customs of the most remote

of Norwegian peoples.

To be an artist in Norway,

you had to kit yourself out with skis and furs.

You had to travel by land and by sea - you had to be an explorer.

There's a collective term for the group of painters who set out

to celebrate Norwegian nationhood during the mid-19th century -

the Romantic Nationalists.

Romantic, because so many of their pictures revel in the wilder

extremes of Norwegian nature.

Nationalist, because their work

exudes pride in the uniqueness

of Norway and its old folk traditions.

A boat-borne wedding procession crosses the waters of the fjord.

A group of loggers steer felled tree trunks

through treacherous rapids.

But even as they painted their bucolic, salt of the earth peasants,

bearers of a proud and ancient culture,

that culture was beginning to disappear.

After centuries of isolation,

Norway was suddenly being drawn into the vortex of the modern world.

Improvements in health and hygiene fuelled a population boom.

But the country's soil wasn't rich enough to sustain so many.

Widespread famine forced hundreds of thousands to the cities

in search of work.

Hundreds of thousands more left Norway altogether.

Most Romantic Nationalist painters refused to face up to these changes,

but just sometimes the bitter truth did creep to the surface.

This picture is by Adolph Tidemand

and it's entitled The Grandfather's Blessing.

Its subject is the great emigration -

the leaving of so many families -

particularly from rural areas,

which were depopulated in some cases to the tune of 50%.

The grandfather blesses his pale-faced grandchild,

his daughter stares into space,

the grandmother sheds a last tear of farewell,

while the young husband busies himself about packing their bags.

They've eaten their last meagre meal on Norwegian soil.

The cauldron still simmers - the soup is still just steaming -

it's a bleak subject, for bleak times

and a reminder - when you are walking through Norwegian art galleries

filled with these rousing patriotic images of nationhood -

that while the band was playing, whilst the anthem was being

sounded out, half the audience were in fact quietly leaving.

Artists in search of a Norway that truly hadn't changed

were forced to journey ever further North.

Few outsiders had ever visited Norway's Arctic region,

other than whalers and fur traders.

No artists had ever ventured this far north.

Well, why would they?

Then, in 1832, a passionately patriotic Norwegian landscape painter

embarked on a long journey up the country's west coast

and into the Arctic Circle.

Peder Balke came from a family of tithed peasants

so poor they'd had to make bread from tree bark.

He'd worked hard to learn his craft

and for the next 40 years,

well into the 1870s, he would

chart his country's emptiest places.

Balke's epic visions of the majestic North are some of

the best kept secrets in all of Scandinavian art.

Peder Balke travelled to the northernmost

parts of Norway.

A place where the mountainous wastes of the landscape

meet the bleak immensities of the ocean.

And what he found here, at the bitter end of Scandinavia itself,

was a place that seemed so primal,

so extreme,

that all of the conventions of landscape that he'd been taught

seemed virtually useless.

So, he dropped them all and invented a completely new style,

he even pared down his palette,

to the ultimate simplicities of black and white.

And he created a series of images so extreme,

that looking at them today, it is almost as if you are confronting

the elemental nature of the landscape itself.

The wildness and the coarse brushstrokes of Balke's style

proved too daring for contemporary tastes.

His work still seems desolate, bleak.

Storms rage and seas churn under skies without memory of morning,

or hope of night.

They might look raw, but they're also delicate and sophisticated,

with their coiled waves, fluid washes of grey sky

and wind blown birds little more than flicks of paint.

Peder Balke's brand of Nationalism wasn't nostalgic,

but political and radical.

When he wasn't painting in the wilds, he was an activist in Oslo,

a founder of the trade union movement,

who improved the lives of the urban poor.

And while Balke's otherworldly landscapes might seem at odds

with his social concerns,

perhaps they were meant as consoling visions of a purer world

beyond the city.

Perhaps, they were his message

of hope to his struggling fellow Norwegians -

we've survived the extremes of nature,

so surely we can survive anything the modern world might throw at us.

Some of Balke's most memorable images of all -

images poised between darkness and light, doubt and hope -

are depictions of that most elusive of all Arctic phenomena -

aurora borealis - the northern lights.

The spectacular light show is caused by solar flare

glancing off the earth's atmosphere.

It's most visible during the long, dark winters

in the northernmost latitudes.

The same effects of light and landscape that inspired Peder Balke

still inspire Norwegians today.

Photographer Bjorn Jorgensen - a native of northern Norway -

is also fascinated by his country's most remote places.

So, Bjorn, you must do quite a bit of walking?

I do, actually. I like being in the outdoors and hiking.

And as a nature photographer, I sort of have to be outdoors.

And do you like going on your own, or in company?

What do you prefer?

One...company with one is OK,

but I also like being out alone in the nature.

Sort of get more overwhelming sense of nature.

Especially when the northern lights explode in the sky and I'm alone,

far away from some civilisation.

I really enjoy that feeling.

Travelling on his own in a campervan,

Bjorn spends several nights at a time in pursuit of his subject.

Not just the northern lights, but every aspect of his native land.

You take a lot of photographs of the Norwegian landscape,

but it strikes me as rather a difficult landscape to photograph,

because so much of it is so bleak, so empty.

It's almost as if you're taking photographs of nothingness,

but trying somehow to capture its spirit.

Well, yes, that's true. Especially in northern parts of Norway

and the further north you come,

the more harsh and barren landscape it is.

But I think it has its own kind of beauty,

not in the traditional thinking of beauty -

but I like that.

You say bleakness and the harsh landscape.

Almost no vegetation.

The conditions people are living under interests me

and I think it's fascinating, yes.

I try to see a contrast between

the harsh landscape and human activity.

Tracks people have placed in the landscape.

Be it a road, be it a house underneath a cliff -

I think that's a contrast that I really try to capture.

You seem to be quite interested

in the ingenuity of your fellow countrymen.

Almost in the sense of the miracle of having made a place to live here.

Exactly, yes. Because who could believe somebody could live

under these conditions?

Many Norwegians today seem to cultivate a certain remoteness -

embrace it, even.

It's as if they've never really recovered from the great trauma

of modern Norwegian history.

After centuries of isolation in the wilderness,

the shock of 19th century industrialisation

was all the more brutal for its suddenness.

No artist embodied Norway's painful dislocation

from its innocent rural past

more than Lars Hertervig.

A hypersensitive young man, doomed to disappointment and tragedy,

he might be described as a Scandinavian Van Gogh -

except that outside Norway, he still remains almost completely unknown.

Hertervig's early career

followed the now familiar Norwegian trajectory.

The son of desperately poor peasant farmers from Bergen,

he showed promise painting charming,

if not yet remarkable landscapes.

Art education was still inadequate in Norway, but in 1852,

with the help of some local sponsors,

he was able to travel abroad to study.

Aged 23, he arrived in Dusseldorf.

It wasn't destined to end well.

Imagine a young, raw, awkward,

shy Norwegian boy

suddenly transplanted from the wilderness

to a busy university town.

He didn't get on very well with his fellow students

and to make matters worse,

he fell in love with the beautiful daughter of his landlady.

Then, a horrible practical joke was played on him.

He was given to understand that a meeting had been arranged

between him and his beloved,

but when he turned up at the appointed hour,

there was no-one there but a group of bullying students,

mocking and jeering at him.

He fell in to a deep melancholy

and then an even deeper depression.

He had to be sent home to Norway.

He was sent here to Gaustad

and the country's first lunatic asylum.

A programme of fresh air, exercise and hard work

failed to cure Hertervig.

After 18 months of treatment, he was labelled incurably insane

and sent home to live with his family.

It was only after others had written him off as a lost cause

that he began to paint a new and unique kind of landscape.

Hertervig's paintings are strange

and extraordinary apparitions that take us far beyond

the optimistic conventions of patriotic landscape painting

in earlier 19th century Norway

and plunge us into worlds of strangeness and mystery.

Look at this extraordinary image of a crag

surrounded by clouds that boil.

Three lonely ships huddling in the shadow of the rock,

while beneath, the stillness of the waters is so still

it seems almost like another version of the sky.

You don't know where up is, you don't know where down is.

It's completely bewildering.

The sense of mystery is enhanced even more, I think,

in this picture of The Tarn.

Look at these clouds.

There is nothing else like this

in all of 19th century landscape painting.

It's almost as if the landscape itself has gone mad,

been provoked into these paroxysms of movement and gesture.

It's almost like you are looking into the mirror of a troubled mind.

The landscape itself has a tremendously primitive,

ancient feel about it.

To me, it's almost as if Hertervig is attempting to summon up

or capture that sense of the landscape that's always been there

in the Norwegian soul - whether in the soul of the Vikings,

or the Christians who followed - and together with that

there is a kind of fear present in it all.

A fear, perhaps, that just as this landscape might almost

be on the point of reverting back to some primordial waste,

that there is no meaning, there is no purpose,

there is no pattern to the natural world -

the world simply is there.

Hertervig's paintings are a reminder that it wasn't just Norway's

physical landscapes and cityscapes that were being transformed

during the mid-nineteenth century.

The landscapes of the mind were changing, too.

The old certainties were being challenged.

Throughout their history, Norwegians had managed in their cold climate

because their stoicism and their faith in God

had seen them through the bad times.

But now even their faith was being shaken.

Considering the bleak worldview of their Viking ancestors,

it was appropriate that a Scandinavian -

not a Norwegian, but a Dane - the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard -

should present one of the greatest challenges to faith

in all of mid-19th century Europe.

Kierkegaard saw himself as a Christian,

but his ruthless line of questioning would ultimately lead

to the modern existential crisis of faith.

For centuries here in Scandinavia,

the experience of religion had been essentially an inner process.

Scandinavian protestants knew their God not through the ceremonies

and images of the Catholic church, but through inward contemplation.

And it was Kierkegaard's achievement to take that sense of inwardness

and give it philosophical expression.

He placed great emphasis on the individual

and on the drive to self-knowledge.

"The greatest despair," he wrote,

"is that of not knowing who you are."

And in doing that - in laying such emphasis on the self-questioning,

doubting individual - he created a philosophy, perhaps against

his own intentions - utterly imbued with doubt, with anxiety.

He was, you might say, the natural philosopher for a society

on the edge of an abyss.

Kierkegaard's speculative philosophy would be hardened

into outright atheism by later nineteenth-century writers,

such as Friedrich Nietzsche,

who infamously declared that "God is dead".

In Norway, the modern world was experienced

as one shock after another

and now, on top of it all,

the spectre of a universe without meaning or purpose.

Maybe that's why Norwegians today so often feel an overwhelming urge

to get away from it all.

In the heart of the modern city, their artists and writers

still dream of the wilderness.

So, where better than Oslo's glacier-like modern Opera House

to meet novelist and social satirist Erlend Loe.

Nature is the place where we go to escape,

to be part of something and we can be free.

Where I live, it's only, you know,

ten minutes cycling down here to the centre

and ten minutes the other way, I'm in the forest

and I don't have to see anyone for days, if I don't want to.

And this is very... For me, it's very important.

I use this several times a week.

So, there's a sort of paradox in this sense of self.

That in order to be Norwegian, perhaps Scandinavian,

you need to be on your own.

And yet, if you're on your own, how can you make a society?

Is it a society where everyone is on their own?

It's a beautiful paradox. Well, my father still lives in the town where I come from - Trondheim.

He comes to visit all the time

and when I ask him, "How was your train ride?" he'll sometimes say,

"Oh, it was wonderful. I didn't have to talk to anybody."

"I got a compartment for myself, not a word."

Then he's totally happy.

I think that makes us very different from the people in southern Europe.

You know, with grapes everywhere

and sun and you can take a swim, et cetera

-and that's not been the case here.

-So, human habitation is very hard won,

but it's also hard won at the cost of a certain amount of solitude?

Yeah, I would say so. And it will create some kind of melancholy,

in the bottom of it all.

When I grew up, to be rich was frowned upon.

If you had money, you wouldn't really show it.

Now, everyone is flashing everything.

It's money, money, money. It's endless.

I think it's very necessary that Norwegian art, literature today,

address these things and try to just,

you know, destroy the surface a little bit - with a key -

like when you pass a Mercedes with a key - and then you drag it

all along and it makes a wonderful sound, you know.

Next morning, the owner will see it and he will cry and break down.

That's very naughty.

THEY LAUGH

Yeah.

The impulse to scratch beneath the surface of Norwegian society

was never more powerfully expressed than by Henrik Ibsen -

hailed by some as the world's greatest playwright

since Shakespeare.

Ibsen's contemporaries were scandalised by his treatment

of taboo themes - like rape, incest, suicide.

But his greatest theme was the way social convention could crush

an individual's hopes and dreams.

The landscape of the city defeating the landscape of the mind.

He often expressed it through the imagery of the cold Scandinavian climate.

It's so dark here!

The endless rain goes on week after week, for months on end,

with never a glimpse of the sun.

I can't remember ever having seen the sun shine

all the times I've been here.

It's one of the peculiarities of Ibsen's work

that no matter how close you get to the actors,

you never really feel as though you enter their world.

They remain sealed off, locked away,

frozen in their own personal world of misery.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that so many of his characters

end by wandering off -

to disappear or die - in the terrible Norwegian wilderness.

Here people are brought up to believe that life is miserable -

the sooner it's over, the better.

Have you noticed that all my paintings have focused on the joy of life?

That's why I'm afraid of staying home with you.

Afraid?

What are you afraid of here, with me?

I'm afraid that all my strongest feelings would be warped

into something ugly.

Aged 36 and disenchanted with Norway's suffocating provincialism,

Ibsen left the country,

living and writing abroad for the next 27 years.

When he finally returned, towards the end of his life,

he was the controversial grand old man of letters -

reviled by some, admired by others.

He was still writing plays,

his ability to reveal society's troubled undercurrents undiminished.

And he was about to pass the baton to the next generation.

This cafe was Ibsen's favourite watering hole

during his last decade back home in Norway's capital city.

He came here every day at 12 and 5 prompt,

for a simple dish of pickled herring and dried bread,

washed down by a glass of absinthe.

And it was here that the painter Edvard Munch met him

and befriended him.

Munch painted a hauntingly eloquent portrait of Ibsen

sat almost in that very window seat.

Reducing him to vast oracular sphinx-like head,

shrouded in grey hair, venerably bearded,

while the world passes by behind him.

I think Munch saw Ibsen very much as his muse.

He was the chronicler of a world

in which it was the fate of every man and woman -

certainly every Scandinavian man and woman -

to bear the mark of Cain.

To live a life haunted by loneliness,

misery, despair, anxiety.

What Ibsen wrote, Munch set out to paint.

By the time he painted his celebrated portrait of Ibsen,

Munch was a well-travelled artist.

He knew of Impressionism

and the other bold new art movements of Paris and Berlin.

But Munch set out to do something different.

Instead of trying to paint snapshot impressions of life in Norway,

he wanted to reveal the states of mind of the modern Norwegian.

And it has to be said, they're all fairly miserable.

He produced a series of paintings - The Frieze of Life.

Strange, symbolic images, like Biblical parables,

but for a godless age.

Desolate scenes peopled by figures

who look almost as though sleepwalking.

Lost souls wander alienated amidst the whirlpool of the city.

A lone figure on an empty shore

suffers the pain of a hopeless passion.

Munch painted love - or at least sex - in a cold climate -

yielding the bitter fruit of jealousy.

Where Ibsen scratched the surface,

Munch ripped the covers away completely, letting in the cold.

At their most monumental, the Frieze of Life paintings

seem almost to evoke the fresco paintings

of the Italian Renaissance -

dim northern echoes of the art of the Mediterranean.

This Munch called The Three Stages of Woman.

Here, she symbolises both bridal virginity -

she holds her trousseau, she wears her white dress - but also longing,

she gazes out towards the infinite.

At the centre, she embodies zest for life, in Munch's words.

Also perhaps sexual awakening - exuberance.

But this moment of exuberance carries like its doppelganger

a shade of darkness, doubt, guilt.

Munch identified this woman with the figure of the nun,

consumed by sorrow.

In the shadows to one side stands man,

uncomprehending.

Now, it's common to see Munch as the beginning of something,

to see in his Expressionism the first stirrings of that mood

towards non-representational art that would result in

the abstractions of Kandinsky.

But what if you turn time's arrow the other way

and see him not as the start of something,

but as the end of something?

What if we see him as part of a distinctly Norwegian story,

what does his art tell us, then?

Well, I think what he represents is something fascinating

and uniquely paroxysmal

in the development of 19th century European art.

Imagine Norway, little Norway,

a deeply provincial, quiet world,

almost apart from the rest of mainland Europe.

Suddenly, towards the end of the 19th century, what does it receive?

It hasn't had the Enlightenment, it hasn't had the Renaissance,

it's been left aside from the main currents of European civilisation

for many, many centuries.

Suddenly, it has urbanisation, industrialisation,

mass emigration, alienation, revolutionary ideas,

Nietzsche, the death of God - no wonder!

No wonder, when a Norwegian finally wakes up to the modern,

what does he do?!

He screams!

Munch wore himself out with misery.

So much so, that he would never again reach

the same screaming pitch of intensity,

or plumb the same depths of expression,

as he had in his early years.

And it's as if Norway, too, spent the twentieth century

recoiling from the abyss that he'd revealed.

There'd be little place here for the troubled,

nakedly expressive artist -

and there's been no true successor to Munch.

These days, the Norwegian genius is more calmly expressed

through landscape photography, design and architecture,

often itself inspired by the reassuringly permanent forms of nature.

An incline of white granite,

like a broken iceberg that's drifted to shore.

Walls of glass, like the waters of a fjord that mirror the passing world.

Comforting reminders to any Norwegian -

that even here, you're never that far from the wilderness.

What does the history of Norwegian art and the story that it tells

reveal about the contours of modern Norway?

Well, think back to the age of trauma, of emigration and angst

and the centuries of hardship that preceded it.

Might not all that help to explain

the famously generous modern Norwegian welfare state?

After all, hardship breeds a sense of collective responsibility

for the less well off.

Might it not also explain Norway's attitude to its oil reserves,

which here, uniquely, have been used as reserves - for the common good.

These days, Norway strikes me as quite a conservative culture

and I don't think many Norwegians are too bothered that their nation

isn't producing the most avant garde, cutting edge, radical art.

I think they're happy with things as they are and perhaps the most potent

symbolic expression of Norwegian nationhood

was the law they passed here, just half a century ago,

designating all of this landscape

as free for roaming for Norwegian citizens.

It's as if the landscape itself is their greatest museum,

a vast open air art gallery,

where anyone of whatever religious persuasion

can come to commune with the mysteries of nature.