Research Seminar

30 March 2023, 17.00, at the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome and on ZOOM

– LINK

Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe
”Out and about. Swedish artists travelling in Italy in the 1920s”

In the early 1920s, Swedish artists’ interest in Italy increased dramatically. Compared to the 1900s and 1910s, the number of artists travelling to Italy more than doubled. This is usually explained with reference to a renewed attention to classicist traditions and a growing interest among Swedish artists in medieval and early Renaissance art as an antidote to what was perceived by some as an excessive French influence in the arts. Artists’ journeys to places such as Rome, Florence, and Venice or Siena and Assisi offered the possibility to explore pictorial motives and/or narrative content that differed from the urban culture in art centres such as Paris as well as from the more familiar scenery of the native Swedish landscape. The trips were also closely linked to social and professional networking, sometimes in the form of Swedish/Scandinavian artist colonies. The Italian sojourns thus partly served as a strategic practice with the aim to maintain and advance the artistic career upon return to the home country. This seminar discusses some examples of Swedish artists who were frequent travellers to Italy during the 1920s, the coteries they joined, what characterised their artistic production, and how it was received at home.

Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe is Associate Professor of Art History and Coordinator of Research in Art History at Stockholm University. Her current research project, Swedish artists en route. Mobility, transnationalism, and artistic practices in the early twentieth century, funded by the Swedish Research Council, details on the diverse itineraries among Swedish artist from the 1900s to the 1930s. She is the editor of Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History and titular member of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA). Her publications include Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art (Routledge, 2021) and the edited volume Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions, and Curatorial Spaces (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016).