Pontus Hultén (1924-2006)
“[Now] I see little coherence, something of a crisis. But also moments of great courage and, most importantly, an enormous general interest in art compared with when I started in the 1950s.”
Pontus Hultén
Of Pontus Hultén, Niki de St Phalle once said “[he has] the soul of an artist, not of a museum director.” Indeed Hultén always maintained a very special dialogue with artists, though he was not one himself, establishing lifelong friendships with Sam Francis, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de St Phalle, whose careers he not only followed but shaped from the start. The interactive, improvisational spirit that infused exhibitions like de St Phalle’s She, 1966—a giant sculpture of a woman whose interior was fashioned by Tinguely and Per Olof Ultveldt—characterized the whole of Hultén’s career. Director of the Moderna Museet for 15 years (1958–1973), Hultén defined the museum as an elastic and open space, hosting a plethora of activities within its walls: lectures, film series, concerts, and debates.
Thanks to Hultén, Stockholm became in the 1960s a capital for the arts, the Moderna Museet one of the most dynamic institutions for contemporary art. During his tenure, the museum played a seminal role in bridging the gap between Europe and America. In 1962, Hultén organized a show of four young American painters (Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz), followed two years later by one of the first European surveys of American Pop art. In return, Hultén was invited to organize a show at New York’s Museum of Modern art in 1968: his first historical and interdisciplinary show, it explored the machine in art, photography, and industrial design.
In 1973 Hultén was to leave Stockholm and enter one of the most significant periods of his career. As founding director of the new museum of modern art at the Centre Georges Pompidou, which opened in 1977, Hultén organized large-scale shows that examined the making of art’s history in this century’s cultural capitals: Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, Paris–New York, and Paris–Paris included not only art objects that ranged from Constructivist to Pop, but films, posters, documentation, and reconstructions of exhibitions spaces such as Gertrude Stein’s salon. Multivalent and interdisciplinary, these shows marked a paradigm shift in exhibition making, entering the collective memory of generations of artists, curators, and critics as few others have.
Hultén’s career after Beaubourg reflected the same commitment to working with artists that have caused so many to remember him fondly. Invited by Robert Irwin and Sam Francis to establish a museum in Los Angeles (LA MoCA) in 1980, Hultén went, and, after four years of infrequent exhibitions and much fundraising, returned to Europe. From 1984–1990, he was in charge of Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, and in 1985, he founded, along with Daniel Buren, Serge Fauchereau, and Sarkis, the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris, which Hultén described as a cross between the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College.
Artistic served as director of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn, from 1991–1995. He later became the director of the Jean Tinguely museum in Basel, Switzerland, where he curated the inaugural exhibition. After retiring, Hulten lived his last years in Paris and in Stockholm where he died.*
Pontus Hultén, 82, Champion of Contemporary Art, Dies
By Roberta Smith
Published: October 30, 2006
Pontus Hulten, a restless champion of contemporary art whose achievements spanned many countries and the founding directorships of several museums, including the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, died on Wednesday at his home in Stockholm. He was 82.
A loquacious and outsize personality, Mr. Hulten was among the first of postwar Europe’s curator-impresarios. He was known for his breadth of vision and for fomenting sprawling exhibitions that were extraordinary in scope and, sometimes, extraordinarily messy. He wanted museums to be user-friendly meeting places that challenged all kinds of accepted ideas and preferred exhibitions that embraced a range of artistic mediums and periods. He is often credited with inventing the interdisciplinary exhibition and the idea of organizing shows working with teams of curators.
Born in Stockholm in 1924, Mr. Hulten studied art in Copenhagen and the history of art and ethnology at the University of Stockholm, where he earned a master’s in 1951 with a thesis on Vermeer and Spinoza. For several years he divided his time between Paris and Stockholm, making the acquaintance of artists, organizing exhibitions and dabbling in underground films. (He made two.)
In Paris, he met the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, the animation filmmaker Robert Breer and the artist and éminence grise Marcel Duchamp and helped organize an early show of kinetic art that included Tinguely at the Galerie Denise René. A champion of Tinguely, he brought about his first exhibition in Sweden in 1956 and, while working at the National Museum of Sweden, snared a traveling exhibition of Picasso’s “Guernica.” The painting and 93 studies were displayed on raw-cement walls under a tarpaulin roof in the former drill-house of the Swedish navy, which would become the home of the new Moderna Museet in 1958.
Around that time, Mr. Hulten married Anna-Lena Wibom. They divorced but in recent years had become close again. He is survived by their son, Felix, and a grandson. Their daughter, Klara, died before him.
Mr. Hulten became director of the Moderna Museet in 1959 and quickly established its reputation for experimentation in art, film, music and theater while also building its collection. He liked to connect the dots between mediums, cities and people. On his first trip to the United States in 1959, he introduced Billy Kluver, a Swedish research engineer at Bell Labs, to contemporary art; soon Mr. Kluver was collaborating with artists likeRobert Rauschenberg and Tinguely on contraptions and events that united artists, musicians and choreographers with engineers.
At the Moderna Museet Mr. Hulten organized early exhibitions of Pop Art and kinetic art and presented surveys of Claes Oldenburg, Edward Kienholz and Andy Warhol as well as retrospectives of Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana, Jean Fautrier and Joseph Beuys. In 1966 he caused a sensation with “She,” a collaboration with Niki de Saint Phalle, Tinguely and the Swedish artist Per Olof Ultvedt in which a walk-in sculpture in the form of a woman’s body housed a screening room, milk bar and display of fake old masters.
In 1968 he organized “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a show that ranged from the drawings of Leonardo to works by Nam June Paik.
Mr. Hulten said he believed that art could be an engine for social and political change. His 1969 show in Stockholm, “Poetry Must Be Made by All! Transform the World!,” included almost no original artworks and devoted a space to public meetings that was used by supporters of the Black Panthers.
His enthusiasm for public participation caught the eye of French cultural officials, who by 1971 had commissioned a new building, populist in spirit, for the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. In 1973 he was hired as director, and four years later his museum reopened in the Pompidou Center, whose exposed structure, mechanical systems and escalators created a furor.
Mr. Hulten’s opening shows were a Duchamp retrospective and “Paris-New York,” an ambitious interdisciplinary survey that began with reconstructions of Gertrude Stein’s salon, Mondrian’s New York studio and Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery. That was followed by the landmark shows “Paris-Berlin,” “Paris-Moscow” and “Paris-Paris,” and retrospectives of Malevich, Magritte, Dalí and Ellsworth Kelly.
Through friendships with the artists Robert Irwin and Sam Francis, Mr. Hulten also led a campaign to establish the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which opened in 1983. In 1985 he became director of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, where his biggest show included a survey of Futurism and its offshoots. He was later founding director of the Kunsthalle in Bonn (1991) and the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland (1995).
In 2005 Mr. Hulten gave his personal collection of 700 works to the Moderna Museet on the condition that any works not on view there be made available to the public, in an open-storage warehouse designed by Renzo Piano.
In a 1997 interview in Artforum, Mr. Hulten argued for the importance of making an impact on a wide audience and also quoted Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “art is anything you can get away with.”
*Quote and text taken from A Brief History of Curating (JRP|Ringier)
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