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THE MELANCHOLIC, even eschatological perspective that finds a brooding cloud in clear daylight may well describe a Nordic sensibility that needs to be retired as mere cliche--but curator Magnus af Petersens's recent show titled "Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age" at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm suggested that that time has not yet come. An interesting choice for the museum's fiftieth anniversary celebration, the exhibition was meant to capture the zeitgeist's moods of cataclysm as a shared premise not only of life but of cultural production.

