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.