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.

Föreliggande rapport är en inventering över pågående och nyligen avslutade forskningsprojekt i Stockholms län som på olika sätt relaterar till begreppet kulturella och kreativa näringar (KKN).Begreppet kulturella och kreativa näringar kommer ur en viss historisk kontext och relaterar till specifika politiska fält. Dessa ges en kort bakgrund innan författarba ringar in hur man valt att förstå och arbeta med begreppet inom uppdraget. De projekt som ingår i rapporten, pågick eller avslutades under perioden från 1 januari 2015 till 30 juni 2017. De är antingen finansierade av de etablerade forskningsfinansiärerna eller utförda inom ramen för lärosätenas fakultetsmedel eller medel för konstnärlig utveckling. Se ytterligare detaljering och avgränsningar i introduktionen.

The avant-garde of the early twentieth century in Europe was to a large extent a field of migrating artists and the circulation of artists' works. Swedish and other Scandinavian artists were a large part of avant-garde formations in Paris. Avant-garde formations need to be understood as being positioned in a field of several parallel spaces. Matisse eleverna ("the students of Matisse") has become ahistorical, gendered in the masculine unit that with time and much historical writing, has taken on a narrower meaning different from the actual group of Matisse's Swedish students. This chapter investigates this construction through two recent figures of pioneering avant-gardism within the modernist narrative: the ones created around the work of Siri Derkert and Hilma af Klint. It concludes by revisiting the Baltic Exhibition in Malmo 1914, an historic moment where several initiatives of avant-garde ambition were performed on one site.

This article reviews the anthology Globalizing East European Art Histories. Past and Present. Routledge Research in Art History Beáta Hock and Anu Allas (ed.), London: Routledge, 2018. 

How should we understand post-war art? How were issues of cultural transfer and curatorial strategies dealt with in the extended 1960s – the era of pop?

Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop juxtaposes issues and contexts approaching the concept and reception of Pop Art. Contributors from Europe and beyond weave a web that resists the notion of universialism, adding to art historian Piotr Piotrowski’s “horizontal” art history. This volume avoids the historiographic stance where the US—Europe relationship appears to be a one-way affair. Instead, the reader is drawn into the history of the circulation and cross-pollination of ideas, the aesthetic practices and the various contexts that influenced them.

I artikeln diskuteras Helene Billgrens objekt, i relation till konstnärskapet i sin helhet och till några referenspunkter i konsthistorien.

The study analyses the American neo-avantgarde as well as the narratives of Swedish post World War II art history, through a specific subject position. The Swedish painter Barbro Östlihn (1930-1995) lived in New York from 1961, where her work was exhibited and received on a new art scene. Despite the strong focus within Swedish Art History on the 1960’s and the American art scene, Östlihn seems to be marginalized in its narratives.

Studies of selected corpora of American art criticism, and of segments in the Swedish art scene in the 1960’s are maintained. Discursive and field-related mechanisms, which help to explain what positions were available, are revealed. Transnational processes of avant-garde culture between Manhattan and Stockholm are discussed, e.g. through an analysis of the American pop art show at Moderna Museet in 1964. This becomes the backdrop for the final chapter’s discussion of the narratives in post World War II Art History in Sweden.

In the interpretation of Östlihn’s work-process, her use of photography is understood as a strategy to connect her painterly work with urban space. The painterly and the photographic are merged, as in other artistic practices in a historical moment of crisis in painting. The studio, the site where modes of art production are constructed, is one point of departure in a spatial analysis of the art field. Another is the ongoing urban renewal on Lower Manhattan and its impact on artistic work and on how artists are positioned. Östlihn’s co-operation in the work of her husband Öyvind Fahlström, is understood as a merging of a traditional division of work between genders, and new co-operative modes of art-production.

The study is the first academic work on Barbro Östlihn, and covers the time span 1960-1969. Feminist theory, Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and Michel Foucault's discourse theory is used as its main framework.

This essay examines how Italian Futurism could be converted into new cultural capital, transferred intooutjer countries and employed as a strategy in the early 1910s within the early Nordic avant-garde. Around the years 1910-101. the Italian artist Arturo Ciacelli (1883-1966) spent time in Paris in the circle of Robert and Sonia Delaunay before movint north with Elsa Ström, a Swedish artist he had married in 1909. Ciacelli sought to establish himself in Scandinavia not only as an artist, but also as an editor of the new journal Ny Konst (New Art, 1915) and as the director of a gallery for contemporary art. His Nya Konstgalleriet (New Art Gallery), founded in Stockholm in 1915, promoted Nordic and international avant-garde painting until 1921. Ciacelli's embrace of Futurism was less evident in his panterly work that in his theoretical statements, the most important of which was an incomplete translation of La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico (1910), based on the French edition of 1912 in the Berhheim-Jeune catalogue, entitled "Manifeste des peintres futuristes". The chapter presents Ciacelli's activities in Stockholm, Lund and Copnehagen, and discusses the artist's strategies for forestering trans-national migrations of avant-garde formations and discuss his Futurist-Målarnes Manifest of 1913.

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.”

This essay discusses the work of Swedish artist Lars Hillersberg (1937-2004), and it's positioning within and meaning for the establishment of pop art in Sweden. Hillersberg's double position as provocateur and the protegee of the artistic establishment is developed upon, through the backrop of his early work and exhibitions in the early 1960's. mot bakgrund av av några av hans tidiga verk och utställningar vid början av 1960-talet. 

The article suggests a comparative reading of the art and art theory of the artists Hilma af Klint and Ivan Aguéli, as well as of their position in the art historical narration.

This essay discusses the artistic and educational experiences of the Scandinavian students of Henri Matisse 1908-11, with their career strategies as a guiding line through the material. But first, background is drawn on the availability of relevant art education in their home countries - choosing Matisse was as often a decision based on a lack. In Paris several Académies libres was visited by young Scandinavian artists. - After having returned to Scandinavia, some of Matisse's students successfully claimed Matisse as a part of their avant-garde identity, while for others, foremost the female students, this career strategy was in reality not on option.

HON – en katedral (SHE – a cathedral, June 4–September 4, 1966) at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, was structured as a giant, reclining woman filling the entire space of the museum’s largest room, more or less to its edges (fig. 1). She was painted white with patterns of clear colors over parts of her body. Entering HON – en katedral (hereafter simply Hon) through its vagina, the audience found themselves walking and climbing in something that has been referred to as a kind of amusement park. The image of the invasive, female body placed directly into the heart of the museum institution served to disturb power relations within artistic networks and cultural life at a time when both the representation of women and gender positions in the arts were being challenged.