It goes without saying that the discourse of modernity in the western world has been strongly shaped by notions of mobility. Being a modern artist implied being on the move, whether literally through transnational travel or figuratively through transgressive aesthetic practices. Travelling abroad was internalised as a compulsory part of the professional identity of an artist and habitualised in par-ticular travelling patterns and ways of practising movement.

Since the nineteenth century, European art centres such as Rome, Munich, and Paris had attracted innumerable Scandinavian artists. In the interwar period, Swedish artists increasingly extended their journeys to the North African coun-tries that were dominated by the French colonial empire: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.1 This essay focuses on a number of artworks by three of these artists: the painters Agnes Cleve (1876–1951), Tora Vega Holmström (1880–1967), and Einar Jolin (1890–1976).2 All of them established themselves in the Scandinavian art world as modernist painters in close contact with the European avant-garde. Be-fore the outbreak of the First World War, Cleve had studied with Henri Le Fau-connier in Paris, Holmström with Adolf Hölzel in Dachau, and Jolin with Henri Matisse in Paris. During the First World War, they were mainly confined to the Scandinavian art world, where they made their first attempts to seek professional recognition. When the borders opened up after the war, all three artists travelled to the Maghrib region of North Africa.