Research project Swedish artists en route: Mobility transnationalism and artistic practices in the early 20th century

This project investigates artistic mobility in the early 20th century, resulting in the first study that thematically addresses transnational movements in Swedish modern art. Recent scholarly interest in "global art history" has mainly focused on the contemporary art world, while historical perspectives have been largely neglected. The project thus answers to a growing need for research that historicises mobility and transnationalism in the arts. It departs form the observation that the strong focus in Swedish art history on the pivotal artist journey to Paris serves as a reductive description of artists’ actual movements, practices and networks. Without questioning Paris as an artistic node, the project differentiates established narratives and restores the diversity of Swedish artistic mobility from a transnational perspective. It offers a corrective to modernist art history's concept of stylistic diffusion from centre to periphery. Informed by transdisciplinary theories on mobility, cultural transfer, and transnational historiography, it details on the diversity of artistic movements and historicises the meanings and politics of mobility through analyses of how it was visualised, narrativised and habitualised in artistic practices. The project comprises of case studies that focus on representative routes and destinations, represent different forms of transnational movements and address the social power relations (e.g. gender, ethnicity, nationality) of artistic mobility.