Swedish Artists on the Move: Transnational Mobility and Artistic Practices 1900-1940

This project examines the international mobility of Swedish artists in the early twentieth century, situating Swedish modern art within a transnational framework and analysing the meanings and politics of artistic mobility. It challenges the Paris-centric narrative of canonical art history, highlighting the broader transnational trajectories that shaped Swedish modernism. The sabbatical supports the completion of a monograph—the first thematic study of mobility and transnationalism in Swedish modern art. Case studies address travel to German-speaking Europe in the early 1900s; wartime isolation and the ‘provincial turn’ of the 1910s as a pan-European phenomenon; transregional Scandinavian collaborations in Paris; increased travel to Italy in the 1920s in relation to aesthetic discourse and art market mechanisms; and mobility in the French-controlled Maghrib shaped by geopolitics and colonial infrastructure. The monograph offers an original contribution by linking mobility from the (semi-)peripheral Swedish context to wider transnational art histories, uncovering overlooked trajectories and cultural encounters. Informed by transdisciplinary research on mobility, cultural transfer, and transnational historiography, the project advances methodological renewal in art history. It challenges methodological nationalism, applies mobility and transfer theories to artistic practice, and engages in current debates on global art history while advocating disciplinary reform.