Democratic by Design Art of Scandinavia

On a windy August the 10th 1628, the Vasa, the most advanced warship

of its time, set sail from Stockholm harbour on its maiden voyage.

It didn't last long.

After only 1,400 yards, the ship suddenly keeled over and sank.

30 lives were lost.

Desperate attempts at salvage resulted in the recovery of 50 cannons.

But that was all...

..until 1961, when the whole ship was raised.

Today, the Vasa has its own museum in Stockholm.

This was the first ship of its size to have two gun decks.

The fact that the gun portals were open

played a part in its sinking,

but the main culprit was its impractically high centre of gravity.

The stern of the Vasa reminds me

of some gigantic Spanish altarpiece, in keeping with Swedish ambitions

to build an empire to rival those of Spain, France and Britain.

But it was not to be.

The Vasa is a mesmerising relic of the early 17th century,

but here in the cavernous expanse of the modern museum,

it's been made very much part of a 20th-century installation.

The world's largest ship in a bottle.

But while it might seem to hark back to the great age of Swedish

royal military power, remember, this is a ship that sank.

And in that sense, I think it's fascinating that the Swedes

should have chosen to place it at the very centre of their national story.

After all, it's a monument to failure,

a great cautionary tale in object form.

Overbearingly grandiose,

lumberingly autocratic,

encrusted with ornament.

It represents everything that Sweden in the modern age has charted

a course away from.

The story of Sweden in the 20th century and beyond

mirrors that of modern Scandinavia as a whole.

And at the centre of that history, not just reflecting it,

but helping to make it, was the art of Sweden.

Although in the early 20th century its painters and writers

expressed their anxiety, even dread,

at the upheavals of the modern age...

..throughout the rest of the century, Scandinavian

designers and architects would positively embrace the modern.

The result was to be one of the most extraordinary social

and artistic experiments in modern history.

While others dreamed of creating a perfect world,

here in Sweden they showed the way and actually started building it.

The Industrial Revolution came late to Sweden,

but by the beginning of the 20th century,

it was catching up with the rest of Europe and with America.

Even the monarchy was keeping pace.

It was progressive.

For the people, not above the people.

Welcome to the house that Prince Eugen built.

A palace on Waldemarsudde Island in the centre of Stockholm,

but a palace like no other.

Just as he was a royal like no other -

charismatic, artistic, bohemian.

This is his mother, Queen Sophia.

Her husband was King Oscar II of Sweden.

He was the fourth son and perhaps for that reason,

he was given a certain amount of latitude in his education.

Queen Sophia was from Nassau in Germany.

She'd been given a liberal, democratic education

and she was herself quite left-leaning.

She said she wanted all of her children to enter the 20th century

with their eyes wide open, to be alive to

the winds of democracy sweeping across the modern world.

She sent Prince Eugen to an ordinary school,

and then to Uppsala University where he studied history and politics

and he was given the nickname "The Red Prince".

He became an artist, a painter, he trained in Paris.

He became a collector.

He was, perhaps, The Pink Prince as well as The Red Prince.

He may have preferred men to women.

Some of the pictures in his collection certainly suggest that,

but there's no hard evidence.

His Swedish friends were always too discreet.

The Swedes are very good at keeping silent about sensitive matters.

So the jury remains open on his sexuality.

Now, this palace was designed on symmetrical lines

to let in the light from the Sound.

And when it was inaugurated in 1905, a grand dinner was held

and I think this dinner,

this event, which is still perpetuated here in the display

where they've preserved the name places,

was a very symbolic event,

because it was Prince Eugen's way of demonstrating his allegiance.

Not to the crowned heads of Europe, not, so to speak, to the royal establishment,

but to the intelligentsia,

because those whom he invited were all artists, writers, composers.

They were also all men.

He may have looked like a prince, but he was a bohemian.

This may look like a palace, but it was really a salon.

The prince was a great patron, who saw it as his duty to gather

a collection which didn't just reflect his own personal taste,

but conveyed the range of the Scandinavian art of the time.

The painter Anders Zorn was part of a strong Swedish

tradition of naturism.

Many of his paintings celebrate the naked human form,

particularly women enjoying themselves among rivers and lakes.

Such pictures weren't merely erotic, but idealistic.

Imagining life in Sweden in the healthy outdoors as idyllic,

almost a return to Eden.

The prince painted nature too,

but he was more interested in the naked landscape itself.

His paintings veer away from realism

and are far from straightforward depictions of the natural world.

There's been a certain reluctance in Sweden to recognise Prince Eugen

as a serious artist.

How could you be a prince AND a painter?

But I think he was much more than a dabbler and I think he's done

enough to earn his place in the history of his nation's art.

What was he?

Post-Impressionist? A Symbolist?

This is a landscape that he painted in 1896. It's called The Cloud

and you can sense from the energies of the painting that it isn't

just a representation of a piece of landscape.

It's a depiction of a state of mind.

The picture makes me feel distinctly uneasy.

This path, leading to who knows where.

To a stretch of sea?

Is that sea or is it sky?

A cloud looms above the scene.

It might almost be a depiction of Prince Eugen's sense

that his own path will be difficult, or could it be a depiction

of Sweden itself as he sees it,

embarked on a journey that may be circuitous, that may be difficult?

It's an intriguing picture

and one that seems to point towards an uncertain future.

As the turn of the century loomed,

the prince's sense of uncertainty and fears for the future

were shared by many other artists.

There was a pervasive anxiety that humanity was regressing,

not progressing, towards the 20th century.

It's the kind of fin de siecle dread to be found

in the work of Richard Bergh.

It's there in a low-key, between the lines, between the trees sort of way

in this painting, Silence, the silence of death.

Bergh is far more explicit and dramatic in Death And The Maiden,

where the Grim Reaper goes after his prey in broad, eerie daylight.

Richard Bergh was at the prince's inaugural dinner and during

his life, he painted many of the leading literary cultural figures

of the day, still in the same sinister light.

This is Gustaf Froding,

the poet and alcoholic, raising his eyes to heaven.

Or is it to his demons?

One of Bergh's most famous portraits is of the playwright August Strindberg.

The prince was a great supporter of Strindberg

and helped to fund his work in the theatre.

In 1907, Strindberg embarked on his greatest experiment,

one which would change the way people thought about theatre forever.

This is what Strindberg called his "intimate theatre"

and while the scale's remained the same, very intimate,

pretty much everything else here has changed.

In his time, the ceilings were covered with yellow silk

to create daylight effects. The walls were deep green,

the seats and the carpeting were green and brown,

and the individual chairs were not arranged as here, in semicircles,

but in rows, almost as if for a recital in a private home.

This was a radical transformation of the conventional playhouse.

No proscenium arch, it was Strindberg's ambition to do away

with the barrier separating audience and performance.

The audience really was to feel as though they were part of the action.

You didn't come here to watch a play,

you came here to be changed by it.

To change an audience, you've got to challenge it.

His plays broke the rules of time and place.

Their narrative logic was more like that of dreams or nightmares.

One of his most startlingly innovative works was written

especially for this theatre.

The Ghost Sonata.

It's a dark piece, set in modern Scandinavia,

full of snapshots of realism.

Strindberg's view of Sweden as a place

riven by greed, jealousy, adultery...

Yet it also takes off into strange flights of fancy,

merging realism with myth in a way that pushes forward

into the avant-garde theatre of the later 20th century.

It's full of awkwardness, unease, silences.

In fact, one of the central passages in the play is about silence.

Silence, the inability to communicate.

One character says to another, "Shall we converse, then?"

The old man, Strindberg's image of the devil, replies,

"Talk of the weather, which we know all about?

"Ask how we are, which we already know? I prefer silence.

"Then you can hear thoughts and see the past.

"Silence cannot conceal anything."

Strindberg's dark energy couldn't be contained by writing alone.

He just had to express himself in other forms

and he was particularly drawn to painting, almost as a form of therapy.

He returned again and again to the one subject that seemed

as changeable and as volatile as himself.

The ocean.

Just like the characters of his plays, who don't really want

to talk about the weather, Strindberg's elemental paintings

are in fact revealing things far beyond actual storms and real sea.

Strindberg lived a turbulent life

and I think his seascapes were an attempt to capture his own

inner meteorology,

to paint the storms that buffeted him -

three marriages, trials for obscenity and blasphemy,

bouts of heavy drinking.

But above all, I think he felt buffeted by the modern age.

He wrote about how difficult it was to be a modern man in this

time of steam and electricity.

He said he felt he had to live too rapidly,

he felt almost as if he were peeled and raw.

"I'm like a silkworm in its metamorphosis," he said.

"I'm like a crayfish shedding its shell."

It's almost as if he felt as though he were flayed alive.

And he painted these depictions of the Swedish coastline

and the sky above it, using a palette knife.

Strindberg was a modernist

who was uncomfortable in the skin of modernity.

Probably just as well he didn't live to see the First World War,

which showed what industry, media and technology could do

when harnessed to the forces of death and destruction.

Sweden, like the rest of Scandinavia,

did not participate in the conflict.

There were to be no bloody 20th century battles

for these latter-day Vikings.

And I wonder if this is why,

when modernist painters and sculptors emerged in Sweden,

their work was softer and more benign than the often disturbed and violent

visions of their counterparts in Italy, France and Germany.

In Sweden, they experienced the shock of the new without

the trauma, or not so much of it.

Gosta Adrian-Nilsson, GAN, was Sweden's

most notable Cubo-Futurist and he created these collages,

montages, assemblages, call them what you will,

in the 1920s and they're full of that modernist sense

of man on the edge of a machine age.

Here we've got a figure who has almost been

created from a mechanism, he called it The Pump.

But you can see the figure's got two little eyes, a breastplate

and a pump phallus.

He was interested in the theatre as well as machinery

and he called this sculpture simply Stage.

This one Scenery.

It's almost as if he were setting out to create stage sets

for the performance of modern life.

Now, over here, in these racks,

we've actually got some of GAN's paintings

and they show his interest in the theatre quite literally.

This picture of 1915, a portrait of Strindberg himself,

three years after Strindberg's death,

but GAN had known him, so it's a kind of memorial,

a memory of Strindberg, a depiction of him as an inferno,

as a kind of human volcano,

seething with dangerous energy.

Strindberg himself said that he felt at times

as though he were about to explode!

And I think GAN's really caught that and he's maybe also alluded

to Strindberg's addiction to absinthe

by painting the whole work in the colour of the liquor

to which he was addicted.

Over here, a very different style,

more cubo-futuristic.

This is Military Funeral.

And up here we've got scenes of the city, construction,

a kind of futuristic kaleidoscope of forms

peopled by these Leger-like figures.

A collage of a city geometry, street lights, trains.

The future has arrived, not just in Sweden,

but also in Scandinavian art.

Up here, a painting of soldiers

done just after the end of the First World War,

but curiously bloodless.

Imagine the same subject treated by George Grosz or Otto Dix,

the great German modern artists of the time.

They would have made you feel the suffering, the blood,

but here, he's just a rather neat enigmatic arrangement of forms.

Quite gentle.

Down here, we've got...

Yes, these are works by his contemporary Isaac Grunewald,

who's bringing to Scandinavia

a different brand of avant-garde painting.

This time it's Fauvism,

the bright colours and the flattened perspectives of Henri Matisse.

Grunewald had a wife and her work is here.

This is perhaps her masterpiece.

Sigrid Hjerten.

It's expressionism, it's Fauvism,

but it's also Feminism.

She's depicted herself in the difficult triple role of artist,

wife and mother.

There's her son, Ivan.

Here's her husband, Grunewald himself.

And here she is, on a sofa being talked over by two artists,

one her husband, the other, a friend.

But I think it's no accident that all of this work,

fascinating though it is,

should be here in the stores, rather than up in the main galleries

with the Mondrians, the Duchamps, the Kandinskys, the Rodchenkos,

because although there's a huge amount of energy in this work -

there's futurism, there's cubism, there's avant-gardism,

there's the art of the city, the art of the machine -

still I think there is something lacking, a certain vital spark.

This Scandinavian modernism

doesn't quite have the energy of the modernisms of elsewhere.

From the 1920s onwards, there was one branch of modernism in which

Scandinavia would lead the world -

architecture and design.

In Sweden, this genius for design would inspire nothing less

than a complete social revolution that would transform

the life of every citizen.

But it began quietly enough with an argument about what furniture

should or should not look like.

Now, this cabinet and two chairs by Carl Horvick

were held to represent the very best of Scandinavian design,

Swedish design in the mid-'20s.

Quite literally so.

They were sent to the Paris World Exhibition of 1925,

where they represented Swedish design

and were rewarded with a gold medal.

They're very beautiful objects.

There's a slight hint of Second Empire opulence about them.

The simplicity of the shapes and the emphasis on the plain wood,

the veneer,

they clearly evoke French Second Empire style.

There's a trace of Egyptian influence in their forms.

The cabinet is a distinctly schizophrenic piece of design.

It's the same height as a person,

human scale, it looks sober on first inspection,

but open it up

and it reveals

this gilded, golden, mysterious interior,

perhaps reflecting the designer's interest in Sigmund Freud's

ideas about human beings as cabinets,

the interior of which was the most important,

the most precious part.

This furniture is clearly exemplary of Scandinavian craftsmanship -

look at this beautiful mastery of wood -

and yet to a younger generation,

a generation with new and radical ideas inspired by the reading,

not just of Freud, but also of Karl Marx,

this furniture exemplified a form of decadence that was to be avoided.

It was too rich, too splendid, too magnificent.

It promoted the idea of status.

It promoted all kinds of things that they disapproved of profoundly.

So for them, the great challenge would be how to, so to speak,

close this cabinet

and open a new chapter in Swedish design.

Marking the very first page was the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930,

a showcase for Scandinavia's design and architecture.

There were four million visitors to the exhibition,

a remarkable figure, given that the total population of Sweden

was just six million.

What they encountered was not just a vast array of new designs,

but a radical new concept of how society itself,

their society,

might be re-fashioned.

The designers and architects of functionalism,

as the movement became known,

believed that if you streamlined everyday objects,

this would change not just the way people thought of furniture

but the world itself.

By designing things purely to reflect their function

and cutting out any ornament,

you might arrive at a different notion of beauty

and indeed a whole new value system on which a new world might be built.

The manifesto of functionalism was called acceptera

and in it the leading figures of the movement

laid out their principles

and their goals.

Uno Ahren in particular had some very interesting theories

about design, which he saw essentially as a field of morality.

He talked about intellectual hygiene,

a need for every consumer to sweep their mind clean,

to purge it of desire

and to purchase only objects that they actually needed.

Out with luxury, frippery, elaboration -

anything that might set one object, so to speak, above another.

In with simplicity, necessity, function.

He might only have been talking about cups and saucers,

but he really did believe that if people could be re-educated

to want and to buy simple, functional things,

the world would become a better place.

But what did this better place look like?

In this 1930s block, there's a flat full of functionalist furniture

and design objects,

many of them first seen in the Stockholm Exhibition.

I'm going to meet Jon Bonn,

a huge fan and student of functionalism.

-Jon.

-Hello.

-Very nice of you to meet me.

-Thank you.

And, er, I'll hang my coat up.

It's a bit of a stretch, but this is beautiful.

That's a functionalist coat hook?

Yeah, 1932, and the first one

was in the Stockholm Exhibition, 1930.

Borge Mogensen, really good designer.

This is fantastic! I feel like I'm in a time machine.

I'm back in, well, 1932, 1934.

Yeah, things, er, early things from the 1930s.

We have a nice armchair by Bjorn Tragardh,

who worked for Swedish...

-The shapes are all very simple, aren't they?

-Yeah.

-I love this.

Does it still work?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

This is a designer called Haram Nutini.

It's adjustable as well.

He's actually one of my favourite designers.

He makes some incredible lamps for

the Stockholm Exhibition 1930.

Very simple but looks actually a little bit like the Bauhaus,

the style.

It seems to me that they were almost asking designers to create

things so simple that they would...

-..create the consumer in a new model.

-That was the idea.

To make the new man, they said. A new sort of man.

It's great. It's a very, very interesting idea.

So it's almost that you don't sit in the chair or the sofa,

-the simplicity of the sofa sits in you.

-Absolutely.

That's one of the things with the functionalism, especially in Sweden.

They really want to make the life easy for the common man.

Tell me about these ceramics. I was struck by this. That's beautiful.

-Can I take it down?

-Yeah, take it down.

It's been drilled because it used to be a lamp inside it.

It's called D9, like a David and 9.

The designer, Daskal.

He worked with classicism and made it a little bit modern with

the glazes, black and red. Typical, typical here in Sweden in the 1930s.

-Almost futuristic form.

-And this was...exactly this model.

It's called D54. Again, a D for his name.

It was in the exhibition. This is in a photo from the exhibition.

And would an object like this have been priced sufficiently low...?

Yeah, yeah, that was the thing with those, they were very, very cheap.

So it really is modernism for the common man,

in the sense that if you put this on your table like that,

you've got the beginnings of a little Picasso still life.

You can say that.

And what's this? Tell me about this.

That's a set by Haga.

He tried to do something really functionalistic.

Things that you can put together, save space, etc, etc.

-So that you can stack them.

-Yeah, yeah.

Because, of course, very much

-part of the social housing was that it was small.

-Yeah.

Economising on space is really important. Can we go outside?

Because I think you've got some...

-It's not quite garden furniture, is it?

-They were in

the Stockholm Exhibition.

These were in the Stockholm Exhibition?

Yeah, all over the exhibition.

It's a real treat to see all this stuff not in a museum

but in a functionalist home. This is an estate, yes?

-Yeah, 1939 it was constructed.

-It's fantastic.

It feels, to me, like we're sitting in a kind of capsule that really

did change Sweden. This little home, this furniture,

it really changed maybe not just Sweden, maybe Scandinavia.

Scandinavia did change.

It started in the 1930s, when most other countries were living

through one of the world's worst ever economic recessions

after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

But in Sweden, a latecomer to capitalism,

industry flourished and social and economic strife was

minimised by good labour relations between bosses and workers.

But where was the working population to live?

The question was answered when, in 1932,

a new Social Democrat government

embarked on a series of ambitious housing projects.

It started here in Bromma, a suburb of Stockholm.

Idealistic architects and designers weren't exactly

thin on the ground in Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

Think of the Bauhaus.

But nowhere were their ideas more fully embraced by the state,

by government, than here in Sweden.

The Social Democrats, who came to power in the early 1930s,

believed fervently in collective housing.

They had sympathy for the ideas of Karl Marx,

but they didn't like the notion of violent class struggle.

They believed in a more gradual, gentler transformation of society.

Give each and every person, each and every family, a good, simple home

to live in and class differences will disappear automatically.

As the feminist author Elin Wagner put it,

"Here revolution will happen when the working wife slams her

"hand on the table and says, 'I want two rooms and a kitchen.'"

The very first Social Democrat prime minister of Sweden,

Per Albin Hansson, in a famous speech of 1932,

the People's Home speech,

he compared the Sweden that he and the rest of his party were

trying to build to a simple home,

one in which everyone's needs would be met.

There would be no one-upmanship,

no-one lording it over anyone else, only collaboration and helpfulness.

And, as if to drive his own belief in those values home,

he himself lived in one of the houses put up in the 1930s.

Not on this street, but on a street very much like it.

Talk about putting your money where your mouth is.

With a prime minister like this,

no wonder there was a growing sense of optimism in Swedish society.

As well as the money, there was the will to build on an industrial

scale, which went far beyond a few terraces in Stockholm.

Before the mortar was dry, the architect Uno Ahren - designer,

social theorist and leading voice of the acceptera manifesto -

was appointed chief city planner for Gothenburg.

His job, this time, to create entire new districts

and transform a whole city.

This is very much the aesthetic of the industrial age.

Some of them look like factories or warehouses,

but it's been adapted beautifully to the needs of daily life

and these buildings have proved enduringly popular.

This one even looks rather like an ocean liner. Perhaps that's apt.

It is a symbol of the new Swedish ship of state.

The Vasa that didn't sink.

The dream of the Social Democrats

and the functionalists didn't stop with housing.

Their utopia could even be found in factories,

like this one designed for Ford in Stockholm, again by Uno Ahren.

Its big windows were very much part of the functionalist aesthetic,

giving the workers as much light as possible,

often a rare commodity in the short Scandinavian winter days.

Factories had been regarded with suspicion by many left-wing

thinkers in Europe.

At the turn of the century, William Morris and the English

Arts and Crafts movement had seen them as the work of the devil,

oppressing the labouring classes.

But democratically minded Swedish designers of the 1930s

like Ahren disagreed.

If factories were harmoniously designed and run, the forces

of mass production could be harnessed for the good of everyone.

Besides, in Sweden, with all its wood, mass production didn't

have to mean heavy industry and concrete.

This more sympathetic material made mass production feel more human,

literally homely, like a form of DIY.

In fact, what we call prefabs were, in Sweden in the 1930s,

called pret-a-porter homes.

And I think, in them, you can see the origins of what might be called

the flat-pack aesthetic.

This would emerge in all its glory 20 years later,

in a one-man design movement which outstripped functionalism and

outdid everything that had gone before,

both in scale and global reach.

It was the brainchild of Ingvar Kamprad, Mr IKEA.

This is the largest IKEA store in Stockholm,

the biggest IKEA in the world and

if it reminds you of another famous building, well, that's intentional.

Ingvar Kamprad had visited New York in 1961 and he'd seen

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum,

that icon of modern art.

And, I think, by making his own flagship store mirror

the forms of that building, he was sending out a very clear message.

He was saying that IKEA itself represents a form of modernism.

Not modernism on the American model. This building isn't meant to

enshrine the achievements of a heroic individual artist.

No, it picks up on a different strand of the modernist project.

What it says is that each

and every individual's life can be made nobler and better

if each and every individual should surround themselves with

objects as beautiful as works of art.

This isn't American modernism but Scandinavian modernism.

It's modernism for the masses.

Now, IKEA might seem a far cry from functionalist design,

but they do have one thing in common -

a respect for the simple design traditions of rural Scandinavia.

The acceptera manifesto was about accepting

and learning from the past to shape the future.

Their innovative designs for modern living

drew heavily on traditional peasant homes.

And so did IKEA.

But to understand that, you have to leave these showrooms

and go to a rather different storage area.

Now, IKEA might be a modern success story,

but it has deep roots in the Swedish past.

And there's strong evidence of that here in the storeroom

of the National Museum of Stockholm.

And here it is.

Conveniently flat-packed.

These are the watercolours of Carl Larsson

and they were created at the start of the 20th century,

and I don't think he could ever have dreamed of the success,

the popularity that these pictures would achieve.

What do they commemorate?

A house with simple furniture,

bright primary colours in much of the decoration,

ordinary tables, ordinary chairs...

And yet they are suffused with a kind of idealism.

They have the strange ability to make you feel

nostalgic for a world that you never knew.

Perhaps it's partly because he peopled the scenes

with his own children - he had eight of them.

So it almost feels, when you're looking at these pictures,

as if you're encountering some Swedish age of innocence,

some childhood period to which the nation will always seek to return.

The interesting thing about these images is that,

while he created them, I think, to evoke a whole world,

as time passed in Sweden and as they became more and more popular,

people began looking at them for interior-design tips.

This was the Sweden which gradually everyone wanted to inhabit.

So what had begun as a series of watercolours,

ended up as a kind of catalogue of interior-design ideas.

And no-one would pick up on that more than Ingvar Kamprad

and IKEA, whose whole brand is, in a sense,

based on the simplicity of this type of furniture.

And, as a mark of that connection,

it seems extremely significant that, when a large exhibition of Larsson's

work was staged recently in Paris, who should be the main sponsor

but IKEA.

The nation that embraced design for all also embraced sports for all.

Because if your house is your home, your body is your temple.

The cult of the healthy body had a long history in modern Sweden

and it was vigorously promoted by the Social Democrats.

The healthy body would be developed with a regime of good diet,

regular exercise and plenty of sunshine -

Scandinavian climate permitting.

The clearest embodiment of this clean-living philosophy is

most apparent in the sports hall.

Built in 1965, it was a genuinely Scandinavian enterprise.

It's in Landskrona, in south-west Sweden.

The marble of the roof is from Norway

and the man responsible for the building is from Denmark...

..the designer and architect, Arne Jacobsen.

He shared many of the ideas of Swedish functionalism -

big windows, straight lines, flat roof.

Inside, the original seating was straight

out of the pages of the acceptera manifesto.

The functionalists harked back beyond the Swedish past

to the classical world.

Not to Roman grandeur but to Spartan simplicity.

From the outside, Arne Jacobsen's sports hall reminds me

of a gigantic viewing box.

On the inside, it's more of an arena, an amphitheatre,

almost a theatre.

And while it isn't a theatre in the same literal sense

as Strindbergs Intima Teater,

I do think it's a very good place to gauge the huge transformation

that took place in Swedish and Scandinavian society

over a half-century and more.

Go back to 1907, Strindbergs Intima Teater,

what are you looking at? The divided soul, angst.

Here, what do you come to witness?

Hygiene, the body beautiful, teamwork, people moving in harmony.

It's all about health and a well-functioning society.

You might say, 1965, this is the great symbol of

the Social Democratic dream. It has come to pass.

But in that very same year, a group of Swedish writers had begun

to expose the cracks running beneath this apparently ideal world.

Two of these writers were the married couple

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

They were both radicals,

Marxists who thought that Swedish social democracy was more

corrupt and far less cohesive than the image it liked to project.

In 1965, they wrote the first of a series of ten novels featuring

the detective Martin Beck.

SHE SCREAMS

Beck might read like a stereotype now,

but at the time, his chain-smoking, bad diet, problematic marriage and

slow, painstaking solutions to crime were like a breath of fresh air.

The Beck novels were far from traditional murder mysteries.

They were very realistic in detail.

The literary equivalent of documentary cinema verite...

..revealing the seedy underbelly of Swedish society.

These books revolutionised the European crime genre

and paved the way for what has been called Nordic Noir.

TV series like The Killing and the novels of Henning Mankell,

Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson.

Lars Kepler is currently one of the bestselling crime writers in Sweden.

It is, in fact, a husband-and-wife team for whom the Beck novels

have long been an inspiration.

For me, it was the first

crime fiction book ever I read, it was one of them.

Yeah, for grown-ups.

-For grown-ups, of course.

-That was the difference.

I think Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall...

..they started a tradition, absolutely, in Sweden

and they also started something else.

Maybe this public movement to read the same thing

and talk about the same issues.

And what was...

What was new about their fiction?

What were they adding to the lives of the Swedish readers?

They were brutal. They were criticising power, in a way.

They were criticising the society and the tools of society -

the police, the government, the capitalism, the banks.

And that was so exciting.

Of course, by that time, Sweden was considered to be a very,

very good society, almost perfect,

a paradise. But they wanted to show what was beneath this surface.

Crime fiction fulfils the need in Sweden for discussion about this,

these kind of problems, but not as an answer in this country.

Not as the voice of truth, I think, but more...

..the voice of somebody telling...

..you that you might think you are safe but things can go really wrong.

The very first Beck novel, Roseanna, starts with a scene

set by a canal lock next to a lake.

It could be the setting for one of those

Anders Zorn paintings of naked women bathing.

But this lake is a long way from Scandinavian naturism.

A young woman's body is dredged up.

It's a beauty spot. Later on in the novel, some home-movie footage

shot by a tourist proves crucial to the investigation.

But that opening scene is, I think, a perfect metaphor for what

Nordic Noir does - it dredges up ugly truths.

"For the fact of the matter is that the so-called welfare state

"abounds with sick, poor and lonely people living,

"at best, on dog food, who are left uncared for until they waste away

"and die in their rathole tenements."

The Beck books were subtitled Story Of A Crime but what was the crime?

According to the novelists,

it was the failure of the Social Democrat dream.

It's all very well building perfect homes, but if people are starving

and alienated, then the socialist promise hasn't been kept.

Within a year of the last Beck novel appearing in 1975,

the Social Democrats lost power

after half a century leading the country.

To this day, they've never made a comeback

unless as part of a coalition.

Their legacy is still being debated

and not just by the crime writers of today,

who are mostly - as Beck's creators were - left-wing in their politics.

Many in the intelligentsia see

Sweden now as a grimly unequal society,

where the gap between rich and poor has grown.

A place where immigrants might have been welcomed, but have then been

left to feel as though they're not really part of Swedish democracy.

This picture of a disaffected

and alienated Sweden has also been projected in the contemporary

visual arts, most vividly in work which exists less as finished

art object and more as a form of extreme,

even masochistic performance.

Nug, a graffiti artist as elusive as Banksy,

but far more nihilistic. He sees a wall and wants to spray it black.

Graffiti art was born in the subways of New York - a colourful,

brash assertion of counter-cultural identity.

But there's no such joy in these Swedish variations on the theme.

This is Nordic Noir graffiti...

..modern society seen as a hopeless labyrinth.

Nug has visited his plague of vandalism upon all of Stockholm.

From the suburban underground

to the upmarket bars and restaurants of the city centre.

Angst shades into hysteria in Anna Odell's work.

The artist re-enacted a childhood psychosis in order to draw

attention to the inadequacies of the psychiatric care system.

The emergency services actually tried to rescue her

during the performance,

which, unsurprisingly, divided public opinion.

Was this political commentary or an irresponsible game of cry wolf?

SHE ROARS

Or maybe both.

These contemporary artists caught scandal and so art becomes news.

Even noise, open to a babble of interpretation.

THEY SPEAK SWEDISH

Makode Linde's work explores issues about race,

European perceptions and stereotypes of the African, immigration...

..the Swedish involvement in the slave trade...

..and even female genital mutilation.

CAKE SCREAMS AND CRIES

All this and more in the layers which make up

the obscenely visceral Painful Cake.

That's the Minister of Culture slicing away.

I hear echoes, reverberations of The Scream,

the work with which I began this journey through Scandinavia.

That icon of anguish at all of the modern age was

painted by the Norwegian Edvard Munch.

He'd also painted a portrait of Strindberg and, although their

friendship was troubled, they were certainly kindred spirits.

They both shared a sense of profound alienation

as well as a sense that there was something

rotten at the heart of Scandinavia.

Strindberg's idea that to be a modern artist,

a modern writer, was to be uncomfortable in your own skin

wasn't pursued by Swedish artists during the 20th century.

Here, modernism is harnessed to a sense of optimism,

of collective social idealism.

Now, whether the Social Democratic dream is dead, who's to say?

But the cracks that appeared in the 1960s haven't gone away

and now a new generation of artists has emerged who

seem very much in the Strindberg mould.

They're agent provocateurs, pranksters.

They act out the anxieties of their society.

But how well founded are those anxieties and fears?

I've been told that if you want to experience

the failings of Swedish society, you have to go underground.

Take the red line from the centre of Stockholm

and travel towards the outer suburbs.

True enough, there's a stark difference between the centre -

home to government, banks and business -

and what lies beyond.

But I can't find the badlands described by the social critics

of modern Sweden.

Nothing truly noir, for sure.

In fact, if I had to name a city that exemplifies failing

social services, a crumbling transport infrastructure

and yawning chasms of wealth,

I'd pick London any day over Stockholm.

And on even the most remote station,

the Swedish underground still does really beautiful benches.

Perfect seating for all, democratic by design.

Maybe it's because the old Social Democrat dream of a perfectly

equal society was so strong

and radiant that any falling short becomes magnified.

But while it might not be utopia,

modern Sweden's got a lot going for it.

Take the Citadellbadet in Landskrona,

where I also visited Arne Jacobsen's sports hall.

This swimming pool too was a civic project, recently remodelled

and refurbished by architect Gert Wingardh.

This might be quirkier than functionalist architecture,

with its coloured-glass changing rooms

and mushroom-shaped viewing platform,

cleverly picking up the form of an older water tower nearby...

..but this aquatic paradise for swimmers of all ages

enshrines the core values that have created modern Sweden.

Could that be Prince Eugen's cloud of uncertainty hovering

over the horizon?

Maybe.

But, if so, I think this is the Sweden that has emerged from it -

a place that promises everyone, no matter who they are or where

they come from, a little bit of beauty

and a little bit of happiness.

It might not be a perfect world...

but it's not a bad one.