There's a single word in Danish that translates as "enlightenment-for-the-people". It's not a phrase that would be used here without some hint of irony or embarrassment, but it seems to pop up a lot in conversations about the arts in Denmark. From visual art and architecture to children's arts, literature, music and the superb public library system, cultural life in Denmark is teeming, vigorously promoted and supported by the state.
It's all right for the Danes, you mutter - they've got money to burn (70 million kroner/about £7 million every year on arts and culture) - but a visit to Denmark rapidly reveals that it's not simply a question of money. Is it ever? There are other small matters to contend with, such as imagination, uncompromised risk-taking, commitment, visual awareness and general sensitivity to beauty . . .
Pride in all this cultural activity is what has given birth to "Out Of Denmark", the first festival of Danish culture in Ireland, which begins tomorrow. It's a very cautious venture, focusing on three major institutions: the National Gallery, National Concert Hall and National Museum, but with luck, it will be the bridgehead for more wide-ranging, adventurous forays - into theatre, film and literature, for example.
Initiated by the Danish ambassador to Ireland, Ulrik Federspiel, the aim is to heighten awareness of Danish culture in Ireland and to foster links between the two countries, which, of course, stretch back to the Viking period, when Danish interest in Ireland was a little less friendly.
At the National Museum (from tomorrow until next April) an exhibition of Viking ships will include the model of a 30-metre warship, recently found in Denmark, which was built in Dublin in the early 11th century. As part of the exhibition, which complements the museum's existing Viking collection, Danish archaeologists from the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum will construct a Viking ship, demonstrating the extent to which the Viking sailors' skills of building, rigging and navigation have been reconstructed through painstaking research.
At the NCH tomorrow night at 8 p.m., the celebrated Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Emanuel Ax and the orchestra's Principal Guest Conductor, Michael Schonwandt, will perform Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, with Nielsen's Symphony No 4 as the highlight.
Founded in 1925, the orchestra has a distinguished record of broadcasting, touring and recording and devotes a substantial portion of its repertoire to music by Danish composers.
Awareness of light is what distinguishes contemporary Danish architecture and design, as demonstrated in the magnificent, sculptural, Arken Museum of Modern Art, designed by Soren Robert Lund; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, overlooking the coast and built to harmonise with the landscape, and the new, controversial extension to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. The quality of light on the northernmost tip of Jutland is what drew a group of artists to a fishing village there at the end of the last century, inspired by the French Impressionists' plein air work in Provence.
EIGHTY paintings from this "Skagen School", donated by the Skagen Museum and the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen, are on loan to the National Gallery (from tomorrow until January) and vividly capture the particular, limpid quality of light on this coast, dominated by the massif of shifting sand known as Rabjerg Mile.
Skagen itself, with its clusters of highgabled, red-tiled houses with mustard walls that catch the sunlight, and its magnificent coast with dunes stretch into the horizon, is memorably captured in the warm domestic studies of Anna Ancher and the genre paintings of village life by her husband, Michael Ancher.
P.S. Kryer, probably the best known of the group outside Denmark, painted many haunting portraits of his unhappy wife, Marie, during what these painters called "the blue hour" - the moment of melancholy stillness at day's end, with figures outlined against the hazy merging of sand and sky, suffused in delicate northern light. This must be what they mean by "enlightenment-of-thepeople".
Further information on Out Of Denmark and associated events may be obtained from the National Concert Hall, the National Mu- seum of Ireland and the National Gallery, as well as on the Royal Danish Embassy's Website: http:/www.denmark.ie