The Baltic Queen

It was April, and broken ice still clinked in the waters around beautiful Stockholm, breaking the reflections of its candy-coloured 18th century houses, grand hotels, opera house. Here I queued up for a late ticket and saw a boring, but beautifully designed Werther for eight quid, sitting up in the gods under swirling gilt, while across the water on the trendy South Island, a new, atonal opera by Daniel Bortz about Marie-Antoinette's Swedish lover, commissioned by the Stockholm '98, was playing to the packed "folk" opera house.

The only signs of the economic depression in which the country is gripped are the huge, fluorescent signs in the windows of restaurants, offering the Dagens Rat, or offer of the day, at ever lower prices. It's still not a cheap place to visit, but The Rough Guide's suggestion that I check out Mc Donald's for coffee proved alarmist. The recession has hacked away at Sweden's socialist foundations, but still they found a whopping 450 million Crowns, or over £40 million, most of which came from public funds, to marry with the EU's 10 million Crowns to fund the year, and in February declared open Moderna Museet, surely one of the most beautiful art galleries in Europe, which cost roughly the same as the Cultural Capital year.

The museum stands on the island of Skeppsholmen, reached from the shore by a narrow bridge. Walking across on a crisp, sunny morning, to the tune of those chunks of ice in the sea, felt like entering a consciously created alternative space, like the gibbons' colony in Dublin zoo - for this is an island of art, playing host also to the Architecture Museum, the East Asian Art Museum and the Royal Academy for Visual Art. This impression was reinforced by the exhibition of Tintoretto's Annunciation of the Virgin, lit by glimmering candles, in the island's church. The new Museum of Modern Art stands beside its former premises, on a height above the water, looking towards Stockholm. The Spanish architect, Rafael Moneo, won the prestigious international competition to design the 1,000 square metre gallery, but he has responded to his surroundings to the degree that the building looks typically Swedish, using long cuts of warm wood on the floors and opening out to the sea and to that ephemeral northern light as much as possible.

The new director, David Elliott, is English, and was formerly Director of the Museum Of Modern Art in Oxford. This is certainly very much a "curator's gallery", but not in a heavy-handed way, because Elliott's touch is playful and provocative.

PERHAPS the most controversial of the opening exhibitions was Dialogues: International Art From The Collection, in which works of art were displayed together to create, arguably, a new work of art - an installation created by the curator. Constantin Brancusi's classical The Newborn (1920), a perfect alabaster egg on a plinth, was grouped with Kiki Smith's Sperm Piece (1991), beautiful glass sperm wriggling across the floor, and James Rosenquist's piece of classic Pop Art, I Love You With My Ford (1961), a divided canvas picturing a comic book woman's face, a thrusting Ford bonnet, and a wriggling sea of tinned spaghetti.

Wounds: between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art was a far more serious affair, placing works by artists such as Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor and Edward Kienholz side by side to explore, more than anything else, the darkness in a world in which God is dead and man's fear of our self-created modern society. Charlotte Corday stands like a beautiful but also threatening Venus, her knife in her hand, as Marat slumps, spent, in the bath in Munch's The Death Of Marat 11. Marina Abramovics is represented by video works: at one point, the juxtaposition is between a woman swaying seductively to a gentle tango on one screen, while she flays herself brutally on another. The connection is between the two forms despite itself, and the piece is subtly persuasive.

Kienholz's Ward 19 is one of the more disturbing works, particularly as it was inspired by the artist's memory of a particular old man in an asylum in which he worked: the viewer peers in to find two parallel men lying, ringed in harsh, electric neon. Then the appalling happens: a black fish swims past in the glass cavity that is the face of first one, and then the other figure. No One's Dogs: 100 Years Of Swedish Art contained one wonderful curiosity - Stockholm At Night (1903) by one August Strindberg, a characteristically stormy scene of black and white billows, against which a narrow ring of city lights battle. In the latter part of the last century and the early part of this century there seems to have been a vogue in Sweden for brightly painted scenes with naively distorted perspectives, which left me cold, but judging by the numbers in which they are presented, they must have a special place in the Swedish heart. From the work of more recent times, Jan Hafstrom's magnificent Grandmother (1972) stares into the memory, an intense close-up of a face of crumpled parchment, with hollow eyes, lit with a green, ghostly light. Dick Bengtsson is Sweden's voice in the school of alienation, with trademark swastikas marked on his Hat And Cap Factory (1969), two glowering factories against a green sky in the light of a pale moon.

The city is also taking to its heart the concept of temporary art. Arkipelag, a programme of 40 revolving small exhibitions of contemporary art, dotted like islands in an archipelago in the great sea of Stockholm's museums, plays nicely on two of the city's most obvious traits: its wonderful coastal situation, crumbling into the Baltic in a hail of islands, and its perfectly astonishing collection of museums. Apparently there are about 60 of the things for a population of 1.5 million, and once you've come face to face with your fourth or fifth mammoth of a building, you may feel your courage wane. But the Swedes are proud of them: "We have always had this sense of order, of wanting to keep records," explains Pelle Andersson, a cultural writer with Aftonbladet. "We had a census very early, and public libraries in the early 19th century."

As a visitor to Sweden, I was inevitably drawn to the works in the five Arkipelag exhibitions which concentrated obviously on aspects of Swedish culture. Probably what we know most about Swedish culture is its domestic design, and Stockholm '98 have responded magnificently to this tradition by commissioning a range of household items - eight kroner will be donated from each sale to a fund for emerging designers. But Lebensraum - or IKEA at the End of Metaphysics tangles mercilessly with that chain of Swedish furnishing stores, seeing it as peddling a post-Lutheran vision of world conformity. Charlotte von Poehl's little book of directions is heartstopping, because that is exactly what one is seeking in a shop like IKEA (or Habitat); Tobias Rehberger's quasi-electric chairs organise society into rigid groups. The exhibition is all the more wonderful in that it is in the Nordiska Museet, a strange showcase of Swedish domestic culture, complete with dummy Lapps and mock-up drawing-rooms.

Arkipelag pushes you from museum to museum, but far along the bay, at the National Maritime Museum, it was the main exhibition which held the attention, not the island of contemporary art within it. People And Boats In The North of Europe, put together for Stockholm '98, opens up the mind to a world linked by sea in a city which is in love with the sea. Moving through the boats from Greenland, Iceland, Estonia, Lapland and the Shetland Islands, among others, Ireland's intense relationship with the people of the Northern seas suddenly swings into focus - underlined by an ancient French map of the region, with Ireland figuring boldly. Going to Stockholm, and indeed, to Scandinavia, is like going behind the wallpaper to discover a hidden history of a hidden relationship, one which, perhaps because the Scandinavians were pagans and then as Protestant as the English, it hasn't suited us to acknowledge.

Coming highlights in Stockholm '98 include the Joan Miro exhibition, which opened this week and runs until the end of August; a strictly historical Viking Invasion of Stockholm with 20 Viking ships on August 1st and 2nd, and The Mirror Of The Century, a vast exhibition of 100 years of design, which runs throughout the summer. For information phone 00-46- 6981998.