Once Upon a Time in Denmark Art of Scandinavia

At the heart of Denmark's capital city, Copenhagen,

you'll find probably the most elegant theme park in the world.

The Tivoli Gardens first opened to the public in 1843.

Nowadays, it's a playground for the modern Danish people,

the happiest nation on Earth, according to the UN.

At the centre of the park is the Hans Christian Andersen ride,

named after Denmark's most famous writer.

But as you disappear beneath the ground,

you find all is not quite as it seems.

Brightly painted automata re-enact the master storyteller's fairy tales.

The Emperor's New Clothes,

The Snow Queen...

..The Little Mermaid.

The presentation might look cheerful

but, in truth, Anderson's fictions are disturbing.

Tortured lovers,

deranged tyrants,

innocents doomed to a premature death.

The tales of Hans Christian Andersen aren't just fairy stories for children,

they're often extremely dark and I think they speak volumes

about the often uneasy Danish sense of self

and sense of national identity.

Denmark's story is that of a small kingdom with an ambitious king.

Ambitious to possess great art as well as a mighty Empire.

It's a history of broken dreams,

catastrophic adventures,

and a precarious survival into modern times.

Long after the dreams of Empire faded, the art of Denmark

would remain powerful and haunting.

Like Hans Christian Andersen's most famous creation,

Denmark was the duckling that longed to be a swan.

Once upon a time, at the turn of the 17th century to be precise,

Denmark was ruled by a proud and lusty king.

Christian IV was a king on the crest of a wave.

His navy ruled the seas.

He was most powerful ruler in all the Nordic lands.

Like any great king, he wanted the greatest palace in the world

and he got it.

So, this is it, the grand courtyard of Frederiksborg Castle.

The most spectacular palace ever built in Denmark

by the most ambitious Danish king who ever lived.

It's tremendously grand,

absolutely beautiful.

Christian IV was a man with huge appetites.

He'd travelled abroad, he'd seen the great architecture,

the great sculpture of the renaissance and the baroque,

and he wanted to create his own version of it here.

But he had a problem, because he rules a nation where

99% of the population are humble farmers.

Who is going to build his great castle?

The answer is he has to import it all.

German goldsmiths, German painters

and a Dutch architect, Hans van Steenwinckel.

Mannerist relief work and sculptures, this great red brick,

like a private palace in Holland,

except on a unimaginably vast scale.

Imposing as it is from the outside,

Frederiksborg Palace is even more sense-stunning within.

A ballroom the size of a football pitch

and miles of corridor, connecting glittering state chambers.

This is my favourite room in the whole palace.

Here we are at home with King Christian IV of Denmark,

very much the swan in this graceful, elegant portrait

by a Dutchman, Pieter Isaacsz. Of course he's a Dutchman.

There he is with his baton of command,

crown and helmet -

an allusion to his recent victory over Sweden.

Christian IV was known not only for his intellectual prowess,

his ambition, but also his vigorous potency.

He had two wives during the course of his long reign

and more mistresses than you can shake a stick at.

Here is his first wife,

painted by a Danish artist, Renaitz.

Anne Catherine, Princess of Brandenburg. Poor lady.

Seven children in nine years,

followed, predictably, by an early death.

She passes, gives way to the love of his life, Kirsten Munk.

She's even more prolifically receptive to his affection.

She bears him 11 children in 13 years

before committing adultery with a German count.

That didn't go down well with our man Christian IV,

so he had her banished and carried on with his many mistresses.

Christian was a king who believed God was on his side.

The palace chapel is like a bejewelled casket.

It's one of the most splendid private chapels to survive from all of baroque Europe.

And at the heart of it, made of ebony, silver and gold -

pure gold - a great altarpiece.

And what a monument it is to Christian's desire to pay homage

to his God, perhaps in hope of military victory.

At the centre, we've got this tremendously vivid crucifixion

and above, all done in silver, Christ holding the banner

of his victory over death.

He exits the tomb in a flash of metalwork light.

Completely brilliant.

And as often with these splendid royal commissions,

there were layers built into the object

that only the king and his priest would ever see.

I'm very lucky because the verger has kindly let me open

this central compartment, which shows the Last Supper.

There's Judas with his twisted, uneasy body,

clutching his bag of silver.

There's Jesus Christ and in front of him they seem to be having a rabbit as their last supper.

Now, you open it like this - I've had my training -

and you let it rest on the key

and there at the very centre we've got the nativity

and it doesn't even end there.

Inside here, I think it's where the wafer would have been kept,

because on this panel here, etched rather than created in relief,

almost like an engraving on silver,

we've an image of Christ being circumcised.

And inside here you've got another little world, this time of wooden inlay.

It looks like an Italian cityscape.

Isn't that a fantastic thing?

Christian IV's altarpiece, secret compartments and all.

Christian would turn Copenhagen into a grand city to rival

any European capital.

And at its heart, he built an astronomical tower

to pierce the secrets of the skies.

Christian himself would ascend it's great spiral ramp

on horseback to survey the heavens.

This great phallic astronomer's tower,

protruding up from the centre of Copenhagen,

is one of the great symbols of Christian IV's reign.

To chart the position of the stars was also to be able to

navigate the seas.

He wanted far more than to be the king of a small principality.

He wanted to occupy and to colonise the world.

The ambition was immense.

But the truth is that it wasn't really to be.

How are we to think of him?

I think that Hans Christian Andersen is quite a good place to start.

Was Christian IV really the swan

who came out of the ugly duckling?

Or was he perhaps the emperor strutting in his new clothes,

but actually naked. Vulnerable to the other greater forces of Europe?

That turned out to be the case.

The great castle Frederiksborg was really just a house of cards,

this great tower was really just a tower of Babel

and the story of Denmark would be the story not of a nation

that grew and grew and grew,

but the story of a dominion that shrank and shrank and shrank.

Poor Christian, his dreams would come to nothing.

And Denmark, rather like the princess in another fairy story,

fell into a deep sleep for more than 150 years.

Who would wake her up?

Not a prince, certainly not a king,

but the child of humble shoemaker.

Born here in the sleepy streets of Odense in the middle of Denmark,

he, with a little help from his friends, would take the nation

on a new adventure.

So, Henrik, where have you brought me?

This is actually the childhood home of Hans Christian Andersen.

So, this was the space in which he grew up from when he was two

to when he was 14 years of age

and over here we have his father's working table.

We have his working tools. He was a cobbler, a very poor cobbler,

and his mother was a washing woman.

Are you saying that this, however many square metres it is,

-was the whole family?

-Yes.

-There aren't other rooms that I'm missing?

-No.

-This is it.

-Yes.

They were from the lowest parts of society.

But still they had access to the highest parts of society.

Hans Christian Andersen played with the future king as a child,

because his mother washed clothes for the king.

So, it really was a small world, almost fairytale small.

-Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

-Goodness me.

-Yeah.

He was very lucky in a sense because there was made a school law

and it was just about the time where people start to learn to read and write.

When he was born, almost nobody could read and write in Denmark.

And also he knocked on doors of people who were more well off and had books.

So, when he went off to Copenhagen he had already read Schiller,

Klopstock, Shakespeare and he says that he likes Shakespeare

the best because it was the bloodiest.

And he would re-enact the Shakespeare dramas

-in his little puppet theatre.

-How fantastic.

So, he really was, so to speak, a self-made duckling.

-Yeah.

-I mean, if anyone made him into a swan, it was he himself.

-Yeah, it was.

There's a strong vein of social satire

in Hans Christian Andersen's stories.

When the great and the good appear they're usually rather absurd.

Think of the emperor with his new clothes,

or the princess who's so hypersensitive

she can feel a pea through 20 mattresses.

I think Andersen always remained the cobbler's son,

a man with a sharp eye for social inequality.

He knew that there were two Denmarks -

one for the rich and one for the poor.

But behind his tales, you can sense the outlines

of a new Denmark taking shape.

A place where the humble son of a cobbler

might feel just as worthy as any king.

It's no coincidence that Andersen's heroes rise from humble origins -

most famously the swan chick reared in the wrong nest.

But Andersen can't be reduced to black and white.

He was a melancholic bachelor, as well as a successful writer.

And it was as an artist, a maker of visual images,

that he most fully revealed himself, anxieties and all.

-You must be Pia?

-Yeah.

Andersen's art remains very little known,

kept under lock and key in his hometown,

under the watchful eye of conservator Pia Hannsen.

-So this is the conservation studio?

-Yes.

And...yeah.

-And this is...you've got it all ready for me?

-Yes.

So, these are very, very, rare, precious objects.

They are papercuts made by Hans Christian Andersen himself,

often for the entertainment of the children of the people

with whom he spent much of his itinerant life staying

-and here we have... May I pick it up?

-Yes.

..the golden swan. Isn't that beautiful?

The great image of Danish hope.

-I always think this is what Denmark wants to become itself.

-Yeah.

Denmark thinks it's the ugly duckling and it wants to become the swan.

Isn't that lovely? And how wonderful to have preserved it.

I feel like a child in a sweet shop.

Isn't that wonderful?

I love the colours that they've been placed on.

So that's a windmill, a sort of animated, human windmill,

with a dangling dancer,

some children at the bottom with umbrellas.

I think I read somewhere that the word for mill or grinder

is the same in Danish as the word for an artist - "maler".

Yes, that's exactly.

And the windmill, I notice, has got fountain pens for arms.

So maybe this windmill is Hans Christian Andersen's portrait of himself,

grinding away, turning out his stories.

-How many of them are there all together? 50? 60 70?

-No.

-Not so many?

-No, more, more.

-More?

-Yes.

-Wow.

But these are the greatest hits?

Some of them.

-What on Earth, this isn't a papercut, this is a blot?

-No. This is a... Yes. That's an ink drawing.

-So, he's created the image and then he's unfolded it.

-Yes.

-And then made some lines, yes.

-Wow.

-I like to imagine that that's the emperor.

-Yes?

This is when he still does have clothes

and he's about to try on the naked suit.

I've sometimes wondered if the emperor with his new clothes

isn't Hans Christian Andersen's allegory of all these

disastrously idealistic or dreamy

kings of Denmark who lead them into great battles,

which they then promptly lose.

All the Danish emperors perhaps have no clothes.

Gosh.

Wow!

Now what on Earth do you make of this?

The three headed creature.

It seems like an image of the divided personality.

Somebody who presents one face to the world, the smiling face,

but the other faces look to the side.

So, what have here? You've saved the best...

Oh, you have! You've saved the best for last.

Well, certainly the most sinister for last.

Isn't this something.

This is the heart snatcher and I think this is an image that

really goes to the centre of Hans Christian Andersen as a person.

Always disappointed in love,

always feeling that somehow it's not going to work out for him.

And this is his revenge on Cupid, this image.

Because there is cupid, he's got somebody's heart in his hand

and he's hanging from a gallows

because as Hans Christian Andersen explains,

he is the thief who deserves to be hanged.

And on this side is the man who's lost his heart.

See the little heart down at the bottom?

He's lost his heart, so he's dying for love and cupid deserves to die

for making him fall so fatally in love.

But that really is an image that goes to the heart -

forgive the pun - of the work of Hans Christian Andersen.

Thank you so much for showing me these.

If Hans Christian Andersen was the heart of 19th century Denmark,

another man was the mind.

He was a humble priest, inspired by the Enlightenment,

who preached education for all.

He believed that every man and every woman should be given the key

to learning and given the chance to rise.

He gave his sermons here at Copenhagen University.

And his name?

Nikolai Grundtvig.

He founded the Danish Society and it met every Tuesday evening

in rooms like this one, rented for the occasion.

And the great difference between the Danish Society and the university,

was that the society was open to everyone.

They were so popular that the government came to regard them with suspicions.

We've got some wonderful descriptions of them, written by government spies.

One such spy wrote, "It's extraordinary, all kinds of ordinary people -

"cobblers, tailors, servants - attend these meetings

"and at the end, they are so enthused, they break out into song!"

The subjects ranged widely from early 13th century Danish history,

to Danish architecture, Danish archaeology,

but they were always on Danish themes.

In a sense, the subject matter wasn't that important,

the idea behind it was what counted - the notion that all Danes,

from whatever social class they might come,

had education as their birthright.

And what this marks, also, I think, is a great shift in the general perception

of how society works.

Society was no longer, so to speak, a clock set by the absolute monarch.

It was something much more amorphous and something driven from beneath,

driven by ordinary men and women, that was where the future lay.

Ordinary people could become extraordinary,

none more so than an 11-year-old boy who went on to become

one of Europe's most famous sculptors.

So famous, that the Danes would build a great temple to him

in the heart of their capital city.

He'd made his fame and fortune in Rome

and the people welcomed him back like a Roman emperor returning triumphant.

Talk about a rags to riches story.

Bertel Thorvaldsen rose from humble origins to become

not just the most famous artist of early 19th century Scandinavia,

but the most famous artist of 19th century Europe.

Rome was the centre of art world at the time

and at the centre of Rome was Thorvaldsen.

He might not be a household name today,

but when he was at his peak, anybody who was anyone coming to Rome,

had to have themselves carved by Thorvaldsen.

Here, we see Lord Byron as Childe Harold on the point of utterance.

Apparently, Byron didn't much like Thorvaldsen's sculptures of him -

here's another one - he felt they were insufficiently melancholy.

Thorvaldsen set out to make the art of Greece and Rome his own,

to possess its forms, to bring classical sculpture in all

its marmoreal perfection into the realm of Scandinavian art.

Stendhal, the French writer, criticised Thorvaldsen

and said his figures tended to be a little inert.

But I think that image of static beauty

was something that Thorvaldsen worked very hard to create.

He mastered a classical technique of carving in low relief,

he studied Roman sarcophagi.

He looked, perhaps, at the Elgin marbles, at the Parthenon frieze.

His output was unparalleled. This is his answer to Canova's Three Graces

and in its time, it was every bit as celebrated,

the image of female beauty.

And at the end of this great long enfilade of rooms,

we find Thorvaldsen himself.

This large, blond, phlegmatic Scandinavian.

He's depicted himself as a kind of cross between Vulcan,

but also Thor with his hammer. He's a Norse classical hero.

And I wonder if in that hammer, so prominently clutched

in his right hand, there isn't also a memory of his very low origins.

He was the son of an Icelandic emigre, who'd come to Copenhagen

to find work as a wood cutter.

And it was in helping his father in cutting wood,

that Thorvaldsen's talent for sculpture was discovered.

This museum didn't just mark the rise of a single man,

it marked a moment in the nation's history.

In 1849, a few months after the Thorvaldsen museum opened,

the people took power from the Danish king.

It was a bloodless, almost fairy tale revolution.

"Can I go back to bed now?" the King reportedly said to his advisors.

At last, Denmark could be ruled by ordinary men and women.

Denmark is at the crossroads

and now it's going to stand tall and proud.

And this sculpture - it's Thorvaldsen's masterpiece -

it's Jason and the Golden Fleece.

I think this unlocks the whole museum's meaning.

As one of his contemporaries said, when Thorvaldsen's works came back

to Copenhagen from Rome,

he has brought with him the Golden Fleece of the classical past.

But I think it was a classical past that had a huge meaning to Danes in that present moment.

They felt that if any one nation really could reincarnate

the great values of the classical past of Republican Rome

and ancient Greece, it was the Danes.

So what began, perhaps, as a personal statement for Thorvaldsen,

this sculpture became a national statement for Denmark.

It's an image of the country itself.

With its eye on the future, it's captured that golden treasure,

the ideal and the idea of democracy, and it isn't going to let go.

Denmark was moving forward.

The people's spirit had been expressed in sculpture,

but the people themselves would be brought to life

by the greatest painter of the time.

Christoffer Eckersberg, another poor boy made good.

At the start of his career he still had to pay court to the Danish nobility.

Far away on the southern Danish coastline is the Valdamar Castle.

Young Eckersberg came here to seek the favour of a wealthy baron

and the castle still contains the work he made,

a very unusual conception.

So, how was an artist in early enlightenment Denmark

to scrape a living?

Well, among other things, he had to create sidelines,

pictures to divert and entertain the Danish nobility.

All of which brings me to this rather wonderful object.

It's one of the best kept secrets of the Danish art tradition

and it is Count Luel-Brockdorff's saucy cigar box.

How did it work?

Well, after dinner, the Count would come here

to his billiard and smoking room with his male guests -

only men were allowed in here -

and he would offer them in turn a cigar,

and when everybody had taken their cigar

he would reveal a little trick at the heart of the box,

he would lower this panel and reveal an image in the lid.

Shock, horror, a couple making love.

It's like a Boucher or a Fragonard, a French jeu d'esprit,

but in Scandinavia the genitalia are in full view.

The man is proudly erect. It's extremely explicit.

Now, you could see this object as simply an early example

of the famous Scandinavian openness about sexual matters,

the very first Danish porno, but I think there's more to it than that.

The artist responsible was familiar with the work of the other famous

Hans Christian of Enlightenment Denmark, Hans Christian Orsted,

the great scientist who discovered electro magnetism, and

his theories about the attraction between the magnetic poles

were applied by the artist to the sexual act.

So, yes, this is a light-hearted, erotic work of art,

but it's very much also an Enlightenment object.

Like Thorvaldsen, Eckersberg and other young painters

were given grants by the recently founded Danish Royal Academy

to travel not just within Denmark, but into the wider world.

There's a wonderful sense of freshness about Danish painting of the golden age,

encapsulated by Thomas Lundbye's beautiful panoramic landscape.

It's as if gazing across these rolling acres of Danish farmland

bathed by the sunshine, he can see a new utopia.

But these artists didn't just travel the Danish landscape,

they also travelled further afield.

They were the first generation of properly professionally trained Danish painters.

So, where did they go?

They went to Italy, flirting with the servant girls.

Finding picturesque figures, like this priest

reading with the hills of Rome in the background.

They travelled, they visited the archaeological sites,

they studied picturesque peasants, peeling cabbage leaves.

And when they came back, they present to their contemporaries,

ordinary men and women, images of their own faces.

This is the first non-aristocratic, non-royal tradition of portraiture

and I think this, for me, is one of its masterpieces.

Eckersberg's portrait of a landowning count and his wife.

And there's something almost hyperreal about it.

Look how close they seem, it's almost as if they've got their noses

pushed up against the glass of the past.

They stare at us - or is that through us -

and they seem almost unnaturally healthy.

They shine like freshly picked apples.

To get to the core of Eckersburg's genius, you have to come to the

Danish Royal Academy in Copenhagen.

Camilla Cadell, the Academy's historian, is my guide.

-And before it was an academy, it was a royal palace?

-Exactly.

So, it's almost part of this transition from a monarchical to a democratic...

Yeah, you could say so. Yes.

Eckersburg came here as a young man with nothing but talent.

He was formed here, he walked these stairs and corridors.

-Shall I?

-Yes, please.

This building was the centre of Denmark's artistic revolution.

-Oh, these are the modern photographic studios?

-Yes.

And at its centre, though it takes some time to penetrate the labyrinth,

are some of Eckersburg's most daring pictures,

given by the artist himself to inspire future generations.

The Age Of The Enlightenment opens up before us.

How fantastic!

Eckersberg was one of the first Danish artists to create

memorable images of the naked human form.

Now, these pictures were never publicly exhibited.

Had they been, they might have rather scandalised

his contemporaries, who weren't used to seeing

nude human beings on the walls of their art galleries.

And they're unusual in many ways.

Most artists of the time who did depict the nude,

did so in preparation for grand mythological subjects,

paintings of classical heroes engaged in valiant activities.

But these pictures don't breathe any of that heroism or valour.

They're very quiet, very modest, very unassuming.

They're both guards here at the Royal Academy whom Eckersberg paid to pose for him.

This model seems simply to be examining a wound in his hand.

Whereas, this blonde model

looking out with an expression in which determination to stand still

for the artist is mingled slightly with boredom.

He holds a straight piece of wood to enable to artist to create

a true line on his canvas, his clothes lie by his side.

When I look at these pictures, I almost don't think of them as nudes.

They're paintings of human beings

who happen not to have their clothes on.

And it's even more true of his female nudes.

These would have been even more risque had they been publicly exhibited,

because it was actually against the law in Copenhagen,

as it was in London, in the late 18th century and early 19th century,

for a woman to pose naked before a male artist.

In this case, we don't have any idea really who these two ladies are.

The indication is from this picture, look at that rather large,

slightly red hand, that perhaps they are serving women,

certainly working women, who, again, Eckersberg has paid

so that they will pose for him.

And they're remarkably unprurient, remarkably unerotic,

remarkably straightforward.

Think of the great nudes of the European tradition of painting -

Titian's Venus of Urbino, displaying herself erotically before the gaze

of the implicitly male viewer.

There's none of that sense in these pictures.

I think what Eckersberg is trying to do is almost penetrate to the core

of what a Danish person is.

As if Eckersberg is saying,

"Well, we Danes here in our Age Of Enlightenment,

"we don't need powdered wigs,

"we don't need fancy clothes,

"we don't need allegorical grandiosity to make us better.

"We are who we are and we're quite content with that."

Mm-hm. The storeroom.

Thank you very much.

So, here she is,

the daughter of the gatekeeper.

Now this picture always used to be hung in the director's office

here at the Royal Academy, but she's been fairly recently consigned

to the basement. Partly perhaps because we've got this

terrible modern fear of looking at images of naked children.

The shadow of paedophilia hangs over us.

It's made an image like this taboo.

Whereas, for Eckersberg himself, I think this was perhaps

his ultimate expression of what the nude might mean for modern Denmark.

It's a young girl, naked.

The girl at this point, the child -

think of the Enlightenment philosophy of Rousseau -

represents innocence, purity.

And I think that for Eckersberg,

this child represents Danish society in the golden age,

in the first flush of innocence and youth.

It's a beautiful image, the encapsulation of an ideal.

But Denmark's dreamers and idealists had their enemies.

Those who hated the idea of their country

as a naked, defenceless little girl.

They wanted to clothe her in national costume,

put a flag in her hand, arm her with a sword

and send her off to war.

By the middle of the 19th century, Denmark might have freed itself

from the shackles of an absolutist past, but it hadn't

altogether renounced all ambitions to be a major European power

and the most nakedly jingoistic painting of the period is this one.

Mother Denmark, painted in 1851

by a female artist, Elizabeth Jericho-Baumann.

Here, she created the single most famous nationalistic,

Danish image of the entire 19th century.

There she stands. Not a classical goddess,

more of a Nordic heroine

with her Viking jewellery and her ancient sword.

A Danish flag on her shoulder, ready to march off into a future,

which the painting seems to predict will be full of military victories,

new territories won.

There are grey clouds on the horizon,

which I think the painter means us to believe are in Denmark's past

but, in truth, they lay in the future.

This dream of a newly invigorated, powerful, military Denmark

would prove to be yet another Danish illusion.

It would be Mother Denmark's sons who paid the price.

1864 was the year of catastrophe.

Denmark went to war with mighty Prussia.

The Danish army was outnumbered, its weapons inferior,

but that didn't stop their nationalist politicians,

with their dreams of empire.

Emperors with no clothes, indeed.

SHOUTS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Inevitably, the Danes met with defeat, a defeat so crushing,

so bloody, that it's become a scar on the national memory.

One of the stars of the recent Danish television drama 1864

is actor Soren Malling, globally famous as a detective

in another Danish serial, The Killing.

So, Soren, it's a very uneasy feeling that I have sitting

with you, because I know I'm supposed to interview you,

but I expect you to interview me

cos I can't see you except as the policeman in The Killing.

I feel like I must be the guilty one.

Time is, like, 2:30. You're under arrest.

So, Soren, 1864 doesn't mean a great deal to many people outside Denmark,

but in Denmark, it's a date of great significance.

Can you explain that?

Before 1864, we felt like we were big, you know, war heroes.

We were a huge country.

We could do nearly everything, but especially 1864, we lost big time.

I mean, for the first time in 100 years,

or maybe 200-300 years, we lost.

I mean, not just lost, we really lost big time.

Was this a bloody war?

Did a lot of Danish people lose their lives?

Mmm. A lot.

At that time, I do believe that 8,000 very young boys,

between 15 and 20, in two hours were killed.

I mean, the big, big battle who ended the war took only two hours.

The German came, there were many more,

I mean, thousand and thousand, and they had better weapons.

That was also part of the big mistake from

the Danish generals and politicians.

If you talk about foreign policy, we became a nonaggressive country

and I do believe it has a big influence on who we are today.

Going from a huge country, if you consider all the square miles

we had at that time, to a very small country

with only five million people.

It was a kind of mark and, from that mark,

we started considering more about how to develop a small country.

So we actually spent many, many years,

I mean, trying to figure out, who are we as a nation?

The story of Denmark is a mix of light and dark.

Bright ideals,

harsh disappointments.

Danes today still hark back to the time of Hans Christian Andersen,

Thorvaldsen, Eckersberg.

They call it their golden age.

Cut short by the shock of 1864,

it was followed by a time of anxious reflection.

A silver age, you might say.

And its uneasy spirit was captured

in the last years of the 19th century

in the quicksilver paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi.

I think of Hammershoi as one of the first artists to create

visual equivalence to what Sigmund Freud

described as "the sense of the uncanny",

that sense that you get when the ordinary world suddenly seems

charged with a sense of mystery, perhaps even a sense of terror.

This picture, Hammershoi's wife and his mother,

a genre painting,

a painting of a snapshot of ordinary life,

but one from which the meaning has somehow become drained.

There are old, masterly elements in Hammershoi's work.

He was besotted by the art of Vermeer

and you can see that in some of these tender, delicately worked

interiors, but there's always this sense of mystery,

of strangeness.

I mean, this is what the world looks like once it's been

drained of grand ideas, great schemes.

Look at that figure, gazing out of an otherwise empty interior.

Even more beguiling is this work of art.

It's simply called Dust Motes and what does it show us?

Some light coming through a window.

Hammershoi was a contemporary of Ibsen and Munch in Norway.

Ibsen, the great playwright of silence, of awkwardness,

of anxiety. Munch, the great painter of The Scream.

And, in a sense, I think Hammershoi is responding to the same world

that they were responding to, a world of urban alienation.

Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead.

But tellingly, Hammershoi the Dane,

he doesn't scream,

he whispers.

Hammershoi shrinks the world to the space of a room

where you could hear a pin drop.

But these aren't just paintings of interiors.

I think they're paintings of a state of mind, the Danish mentality.

Fearful? Perhaps.

Introverted, certainly,

focused only on what's close at hand...

hearth and home.

So what happened next?

Well, that's another fairy story.

But this time, there'd be no more kings or emperors, no tin soldiers.

Denmark entered the 20th century determined to stay out of trouble

and put its own little house in order.

It's as if the whole nation turned away from the outside world.

This is the Funen Village,

just outside Hans Christian Andersen's hometown of Odense.

It quirkily encapsulates a very Danish form of nostalgia.

The houses here were all built long ago and it was only in

the 20th century that they were brought together into this

heritage museum, with quacking ducks and people in historic fancy dress.

Morning, morning.

I think the village is what many Danes

would like Denmark itself to be...

..a self-sufficient fairytale world,

safe from whatever fires might burn elsewhere.

It was made by a people who still remembered 1864 and all that.

What is this museum?

A beautifully maintained memorial

to the lives of the common man and woman.

The whole place is like a living film set.

Well, it is a film set of the past.

The Danish historical drama 1864 was largely shot in these rooms.

But I also think the whole museum is a very potent symbol

of the very modern Danish national psyche.

Much of it was created in the 1940s at the height of World War II.

Denmark was neutral, invaded, occupied,

it had its resistance...

Dark times but they still found time to create this,

a celebration of ordinary, peaceful, domestic life.

A celebration of the beauty of small.

In the dominion that shrank and shrank and shrank,

welcome to the littlest Denmark of all.

Lego Denmark,

the safest country in the world...

..where anyone can build whatever house they want.

There's heavy industry, but no pollution.

There's a royal palace, but it's only waist-high.

And I wonder if this isn't more than just child's play.

I wonder if Lego doesn't actually make rather a big statement

about the way the Danish imagination works.

There is something rather quaint about Lego.

It represents the very opposite of modern computer play.

Single, alienated children glued to their screens,

killing imaginary foes.

Lego brings mother and daughter, father and son together

to create something good, something beautiful.

You might say it turns the modern playroom

into a mini version of Danish democratic society.

Lego is Scandinavia's most famous global export and you could say

it represents 20th century Denmark's one attempt at imperialism.

But what a benevolent form of imperialism.

Play well, play together!

This spirit of togetherness, this love of the small and the safe,

is reflected everywhere in modern Denmark, including the language.

There's a key word in Danish - "hygge",

meaning intimate,

cosy,

comfortable.

I think it helps to explain why,

here in Denmark during the modern period,

they never set out to shock or disgust anyone,

to turn taste on its head.

Instead, they redesigned objects for the ordinary home,

elevating them to the status of works of art.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin.

Danish modern furniture was designed to be comfortable, affordable,

this was furniture for all,

practical, useful, but also beautiful.

And, on a day like this, when the Scandinavian sun is low in the sky,

you've got this wonderful transverse lighting,

you can really appreciate how these chairs and tables

were also conceived by their makers as sculptural objects,

and yet, they're for the home.

The elegance of Poul Kjaerholm's stone table,

a simple disc cut from the finest material,

just placed there for our contemplation.

Wegner's beautiful day bed with its shark's teeth angling mechanism

for the head rest, these beautiful struts of wood

which are part practical but part sculptural, very much so.

Arne Jacobsen's famous egg chair.

I feel as if I'm sitting in an egg.

It's absolutely beautiful,

but I think it's also very distinctively Danish.

How does the modern spirit express itself in different nations

and what does that tell us about them?

Think of American modern art,

the grand sublimities of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko

or the ironic commentaries of Andy Warhol

on consumer capitalist society.

Think of German post-war art, full of a sense of disenchantment

with all the atrocities of the 20th century.

There's none of that here.

There's no strong sense of irony,

or tragedy, or mystery, or misery.

What there is, I think, is a determination to get on with

ordinary daily life and to make absolutely the most of it,

to find and make beauty in your own corner of the world

and in your own home.

Danish modernism is hygge modernism.

For the Danes, small really is beautiful.

And maybe that's the moral of their fairy tale.

Some little chicks aren't cut out to grow into swans.

In fact, staying small suits them very well.

And the ideal of the small, the homely hygge spirit,

which lies at the heart of 20th century Denmark...

Well, I think it's wonderful.

Certainly worth dwelling on.

And there's one building which, in my opinion,

expresses that Danish spirit more perfectly than any other.

A parish church, named after the great Enlightenment educator

Nikolai Grundtvig, in the suburbs of Copenhagen.

Is this modern Denmark's most beautiful building?

Well, I think so.

And it's also a space that enables us to measure the huge distance

that separates the old baroque, absolutist Denmark

to the Denmark of today.

Think back to where I started off in the chapel of Christian IV

in Frederiksborg Castle, a space full silver and gold

and rich ornamentation, but also a space essentially created

for the contemplation of one single man.

This is a cathedral for everyone.

A cathedral for the people.

Every inch of it breathes the spirit of inclusiveness.

It's made from six million bricks,

roughly the same number of bricks as there are people in modern Denmark.

It represents the modern Danish love of modular construction,

given a spiritual impetus.

This is, so to speak, holy Lego.

Also the Danish love of modern design -

the convenient, homely modern chair

is wedded to a spirit of high idealism.

And it reminds me very much of something that Grundtvig himself

once said. He said,

"Man is not an ape, to ape himself or others,

"He is a being of incomparable divine beauty,

"whose task it is, through generation after generation,

"to participate in a great divine experiment."

And I think that, too, is what this space expresses.

So long as the chairs are all empty,

the building is not complete, it demands a congregation.

What it says is that the higher good,

whether that be our sense of God or our sense of society,

requires the participation of all.

This world is what we make it, but we all have to make it together.

And what could be more Danish than that?

# There once was an ugly duckling

# With feathers all stubby and brown

# And the other birds in so many words said

# Quack! Get out of town

# Quack! Get out Quack! Quack! Get out

# Quack! Quack! Get out of town

# And he went with a quack And a waddle and a quack

# In a flurry of eiderdown... #