The basic question is: has the Scandinavian style evolved or is it we who have come to seriously grow interested in the cultural heritage of the North? The response to this trick question may come as a surprise, because the “Scandinavian style,” as the homogeneous being we thought we knew, never really existed. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have always had completely different “lifestyles.” And what about Finland, which also calls itself a Scandinavian country? For the purposes of this publication, we will be adding it to the pack – it is, after all, indisputably a Nordic country.
Let’s start our cultural journey northward, then, with Finland.
Scandinavian music? It’s mainly the world-famous ABBA, A-ha, The Cardigans, and the fantastic metal scene – and small wonder, what better conditions for crafting dark melodies, all the more in that metalheads like to draw from grisly Nordic myths.
There is also Nordic poetry – the musical, romantic landscape of the North. Cold, white, unsettling, but undeniably beautiful. Some was written by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, considered a hero and the creator of the national style in music. The dark side of the famous artist was his alcohol abuse, which caused his wife plenty of grief and suffering. Sibelius had previously studied law, but ended up focusing strictly on music and the violin, though many of his teachers at the time discouraged him from doing so, saying he was too anxious for the instrument. They were mistaken. It was from the violin that Sibelius managed to pluck soul-shattering sounds that froze the blood in the veins, yet also cracked the ice. And all at once. Perhaps his secret was his fascination for folklore and local poetry? You can hear it, wrapped in a dark sweetness in the Violin Concerto in d minor – the only one Sibelius wrote. He was sure to throw in plenty of technical difficulties, which only the best can master.
So if you’re seeking the essence of Scandinavia, you’ll find it in these notes, all the more in that the concerto has crossed over into pop culture. It has appeared in literature, film, and the Mozart in the Jungle series, starring Gael García Bernal as the mad conductor.
Sibelius died in 1957, at the age of ninety-two, to the sounds of his own Fifth Symphony conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, playing on the radio at that moment.
Here is Sibelius’s Violin Concerto interpreted by one of the great violinists – Hilary Hahn.
It is not just Sibelius’s music that is emblematic of the North. Norway’s Edvard Grieg is another outstanding representative. His Peer Gynt Suite is probably familiar to one and all, though often we are not even aware of it. Particularly the “Morning” movement, considered one of the most beautiful in music, with its ineffably Scandinavian color scheme. Duke Ellington made a jazz interpretation of it, while Jay and the Americans turned it into rock n’ roll. “Morning” has appeared in The Simpsons and Cartoon Network productions.
Listen to how the Berlin Philharmonic performs it.
Grieg was a composer and a pianist. He wrote the music for the drama Peer Gynt on commission by Henrik Ibsen; it brought him tremendous popularity.
Grieg is now known as the creator of the national music school in Norway. His work drew from sagas, Nordic ballads, and folklore, and its form was remarkably subtle.
The composer’s influences reach far beyond Scandinavia. France went mad for Grieg, and his music became a ready basis for developing French Impressionism. He inspired Ravel, composer of the famous Boléro. Yet it was the Norwegians who loved Grieg best. One of his most famous quotes is: “I am convinced that my music tastes of cod.”
Thus wrote the aforementioned Henrik Ibsen, one of Scandinavia’s foremost writers, in A Doll’s House. He was brutally realistic in his dramas, especially at the point when his artistic career was flourishing. He exposed bourgeois vices, but also created astonishingly accurate psychological portraits of his protagonists, as Sigmund Freud himself later enthused. Regardless of when his dramas were composed, his chief object of interest was the human being, and their painful attempts to find themselves in the world. Yet Ibsen is now a classic. What about the new releases?
Wydawnictwo Poznańskie Publishers has brought out the Works by Scandinavian Writers series, in which it publishes the writings of Finland’s Mia Kankimäki (Women I Think about at Night – a literary journey in the footsteps of “nocturnal women,” that is, the great thinkers and rebels), Norway’s Tarjei Vesaas (The Birds – about people who are victims of fate’s cruel whims), Sweden’s Nina Wähä (Babetta – a marvelous tribute to the cinema), and Norway’s Roy Jacobsen (Unworthy – the shattering voice of young people growing up in wartime). There’s quite a selection.
It’s just a short step from literature to the visual arts. Especially since all artists of the North draw from similar tales and history. We should pay close attention to Finland’s Jósefina Alanko, who works with her materials in a special way – she is highly spiritual, and yet remarkably practical.
An exhibition of works by this young artist, called Blue Moth, will be held until the end of January at Krakow’s UFO art gallery. We can find allusions to demons of folk tales and the theme of human confinement – all through the lens of Alanko’s spiritual experience. This Finnish artist seems to ask: Can you touch the intangible through art? It’s worth finding out for yourself and discovering Jósefina’s work, even after the exhibition closes.
New culture is important, but in speaking of Scandinavia we cannot overlook a major phenomenon of twentieth-century culture – Hilma af Klint. Few people know she was a precursor of abstract art, long before Wassily Kandinsky created Composition No. 5 in 1911. This is no surprise. Up until now, art history has basically been written from a male perspective, while “herstories” are only now making their way to pop-culture audiences, through writers like Katy Hessel (The Story of Art Without Men) and Piotr Oczko (Dress and Easel: Stories of Painters from the Past).
Hilma af Klint was the first in her family to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, which was not so easy in her day (1882). Women generally had no access to studios, and certainly could not study in the same rooms as their male peers. During classes, they had no opportunity to sketch or paint the human body. Instead of human models, they were given cows, for instance.
Af Klint soon turned to mysticism; she was a medium, created a female support group, sensed paranormal phenomena. It was through these experiences that she painted her first series of abstracts in 1906. Unfortunately, because she was a woman, no one took her works seriously. This was in sharp contrast to the pictures her male contemporaries soon began showing – Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, or Kazimir Malevich.
Af Klint was not appreciated in her lifetime. All her pictures, journals, and notebooks were passed on to her nephew, with the note that they were not to see the light of day until twenty years after her death (in 1944). When this period had elapsed, her heir decided to bequeath all of her work to Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. This was in 1970. Journalists and scholars were soon to begin a debate on feminist art and the importance of women’s art. Yet the museum’s management refused to take af Klint’s work. Over the decades to come, only the occasional picture cropped up at small exhibitions.
This kind of formal dismissal of the great artist lasted right up to the 2020s, though still not without some controversy. As late as 2012 New York’s prestigious MoMA refused to include her work in a huge exhibition on the pioneers of abstract art. Luckily, just a year later, the first solo exhibition of Hilma’s work was organized by Moderna Museet, fixing their error of several decades past. New York’s honor was salvaged by the Guggenheim Museum, which gave her an enormous exhibition in 2017, putting 170 of her works on display. She was the it-girl! Television presenter Alexa Chung, actors, and celebrities hyped up af Klint’s fascinating art, and the exhibition broke attendance records.
Today you will find af Klint exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (until February 2, 2025), Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Hague (until November 16, 2025), The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (March 4 – June 15, 2025), and MoMA in New York (May 11 – September 27, 2025).
Since we’ve now read, listened to, and viewed art, what’s left is the silver screen, or cinema. Here were have a fantastic tradition. One of the giants of film is Ingmar Bergman, creator of such masterpieces as Persona, Wild Strawberries, and The Seventh Seal, specializing in psychological dramas that deal with the human condition and the existence of God. Or Denmark’s Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, The Antichrist, Melancholia), who revolutionized cinema in the 1990s (alongside Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen). The guiding principle of theit Dogma 95 manifesto was: “Cinema is a person faced with themselves, not just an actor before the camera.” There is also Sweden’s Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness, Force Majeure), and Magnus von Horn.
Von Horn also comes from Sweden, but he transferred to the Łódź Film School to study. And here he stayed – he set up a family, took a Polish passport, and has a successful artistic career. Each of Magnus’s films is carefully plotted, deals with a different problem, and focuses on the protagonist’s inner life. The Here After, Sweat, and recently, The Girl with the Needle, have triumphed at many international and domestic festivals – from Cannes to Gdynia and Toruń, and all the way in Los Angeles. In terms of script and visuals, his latest film is basically a masterpiece, with claustrophobic and painterly camerawork of Michał Dymek. We go back 100 years, to Denmark. World War One is over, wounded men are returning home, and the women are working to support the men and themselves. There is no mercy, neither for them nor their children. Karoline is grappling with this hopeless reality after having accidentally become pregnant. One day, unexpectedly, she comes across Dagmar – an older woman who brings hope, like an angel. Except that life is not paradise… The film is based on a true story.
But what about the other Scandinavian arts, like design, fashion, and architecture? Well, that’s the subject of another story…
