In 1968, Moderna Museet presented the first major retrospective of Andy Warhol outside the USA. Showcasing Warhol’s screen-printed Flower and Electric Chair paintings, Marilyn prints, film projections of Chelsea Girls (1966), and a mountain of 500 Brillo boxes (Figure 5.1), the exhibition received intense attention. The exterior of the museum building, ornamented with patterns of the artist’s Cow Wallpaper, evoked the show’s fundamental rhetoric and translation of Warhol’s work: repetition. A selection of statements by Warhol, in both English and translated into Swedish, was printed in the first fourteen pages of the exhibition catalog, as the publication’s only text. The catalog, brilliantly designed, featuring a Warhol Flower painting on the cover repeated in four rows of three, contained black-and-white photos of Warhol and his associates, and was (and still is) considered by many to be an art object in itself.

In the case of the presentation of Warhol at Moderna Museet in 1968, verbal as well visual “texts” were translated. Viewing the exhibition with a departure point in Michel Espagne’s concept of translation as coded allows us to see beyond its more obvious content of American popular and underground culture, allegedly rejected by the Stockholm art scene. 

This chapter, drawing upon the conceptualization of translation connected to ideas of cultural transfer, shows, that the show deeply resonated in its local cultural and political context. It is additionally clear that it was embraced, and a hot topic, within the young intellectual and artistic scene of Stockholm. A dimension of this cultural transfer, besides the notable structure of The Moderna Museet exhibition echoes in the art world still today. It has been claimed, incorrectly, that the show flopped in Sweden due to a politicized climate, which supposedly created a lack of space for a “more complex view on Warhol’s relation to consumption.”1 Furthermore, the exhibition is part of a long-standing narrative of an American soft invasion of Europe, presumably creating a moral shock and controversy through a blunt presentation of Pop art imagery. This chapter represents a contrary historiographic position.

At the center of attention of this issue is trans-local, transnational, regional, and worldwide contacts inside and outside the Nordic-Baltic region from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. As an introduction, this text attempts to give an overview of some of its major themes and findings. It highlights how the interactive function of cross-border contacts is demonstrated by cases of art and design transfers, artistic travels, Scandinavian intellectual contacts, and cross-border connections over 100 years. Together, the texts published in this issue reflect the interdependent nature of international relations and the vital function of intermediate positions.

This article investigates exhibitions of Baltic contemporary art in the Early 1990s, that were directed towards an international audience. Notions of an art life finally freed from the heavy institutional power of the Soviet occupation has served to obscure the arrival of other inter-national and political presences, the ones from Norden. While new Baltic art practices were widely made public in the three Baltic capitals after 1991, the fact that the highest political level of Nordic foreign policy provided an infrastructure for this, was not. “The Nordic–Baltic realm,” is here suggested as a notion of interactions between the contemporary art and foreign diplomacy, and the ability to act upon the potential of the other’s experienced “window of opportunity.”