give the museum audience some historical background. Inaddition to major retrospectives of Max Ernst. André Masson, and Francis Picabia at the Grand Palais, I organized a big Vladimir Mayakovsky show at CNAC [Centre National d’Art Contemporain], the space on Rue Berryer near Place de l’Étoile. We redid Mayakovsky’s show from 1930, which he had organized in hopes of providing a multifaceted portrait of himself; shortly after, he committed suicide. For that show, Roman Cieslewicz did the graphic design and he also did the covers for the catalogues for Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris. But for Paris–New York, Larry Rivers did the cover. Those four big catalogues, which were sold out for a long time, were recently reissued in a smaller format. With that series we succeeded in establishing a good relationship with the public, because we also made conscious attempts to prepare our audience. The Centre Pompidou was embraced by the public because they felt it was for them, and not for the conservators. Conservator—what a terrible word!
HUO I agree. Who were the curators, for lack of a better term, with whom you spoke most frequently in the 1950s and 1960s?
PH Sandberg at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Knud Jensen at the Louisiana in Denmark, and Robert Giron in Brussels; once I even did a show with Jean Cassou on the paintings of August Strindberg at the Musée national d’art moderne. Sandberg and Alfred Barr—at MoMA—created the blueprint; they ran the best museums in the 1950s. I got close to Sandberg. He came to see me in Sweden, and we got on very well. He kind of adopted me, but our friendship ended on a rather sour note. He wanted me to take over from him in Amsterdam, but my wife didn’t want to move, so I decided not to.
HUO A few years later you got an offer to do an exhibition at MoMA in New York.
PH The Stedelijk adventure was over in 1962; the offer to work for MoMA came in 1967. MoMA and the Stedelijk were quite different. In New York, the structure was less open, more academic. It was more compartmentalized than at the Stedelijk, where Sandberg had succeeded in creating a fluid, lively structure. MoMA was relatively conservative because of the source of its financial support—wealthy donors. The Stedelijk had a different kind of freedom, because Sandberg was, essentially, a city employee; he could make policy as he saw fit. All he had to do was convince the mayor of Amsterdam. Catalogues, for instance, were absolutely his domain.
HUO You also put a lot of energy into your catalogues. Last year the university library in Bonn organized an impressive retrospective of about 50 of your publications [Das gedruckte Museum: Kunstausstellungen und ihre Bücher, 1953–1996, Universitäts und Landesbibliothek Bonn, 1996 (The Printed Museum of Pontus Hultén)]. Many of them seemed like extensions of your exhibitions. And some of them were really art objects in themselves: the Blandaren box from 1954–1955 had lots of artists’ multiples, or that fabulous catalogue in the form of a suitcase for the Tinguely show in Stockholm in 1972 (Jean Tinguely, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1972). You also invented the encyclopedic catalogue: 500-1000-page volumes for the Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris shows that have since become so common. So catalogues and books would seem to play a preeminent role for you as well.
PH Yes, but not as much as for Sandberg. It was from his idea of being part of the exhibition. He had his own style that he used for all his exhibitions. I am more in favor of diversification.
HUO Sandberg hosted Dylaby (Dylaby—A Dynamic Labyrinth) in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1962, and in 1966 you organized the even more interactive project Hon (She—A Cathedral) in Stockholm, a monumental reclining Nana, 28 meters long, nine meters wide, and six meters high. Could you say a bit about your collective adventure with Tinguely, Niki de St Phalle, and Per Olof Ultvedt?
PH In 1961 and 1962 I had numerous discussions with Sandberg about doing an exhibition of site-specific installations created by several artists. He accepted, and Dylaby opened in Amsterdam in 1962. After that, I wanted to do something even more collaborative, with several artists working together on one large piece. Over the years, the project had several names: Total Art, Vive la Liberté, and The Emperor’s New Clothes. In the early spring of 1966, I finally managed to bring Jean Tinguely and Niki de St Phalle to Stockholm to work with the Swedish artist Per Olof Ultvedt and myself. Martial Raysse withdrew at the last minute—he’d been selected for the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The idea was that there would be no preparation; nobody would have a particular project in mind. We spent the first day discussing how to put together a series of “stations,” as in Stations of the Cross. The next day we started to build the station “Women Take Power.” It didn’t work. I was desperate. At lunch I suggested we build a woman lying on her back, inside of which would be several installations. You would enter through her sex. Everyone was very enthusiastic. We managed to finish her in five weeks, inside and outside. She was 28 meters long and about nine meters high. Inside there was a milk-bar, in the right breast; a planetarium showing the Milky Way in the left breast; a mechanical man watching TV in her heart; a movie-house showing a Greta Garbo film in her arm; and an art gallery with fake old masters in one leg. The day of the press preview, we were exhausted; the next day, there was nothing in the newspapers. Then Time wrote a favorable piece and everybody liked her. As Marshall McLuhan said, “Art is anything you can get away with.” The piece seemed to correspond to something in the air, to the much-vaunted “sexual liberation” of that time.
HUO In 1968 you put together a big exhibition at MoMA,The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. What was its premise?
PH MoMA had asked me to put together an exhibition on kinetic art. I told Alfred Barr that the subject was too vast, and instead proposed a more critical and thematic exhibit on the machine. The machine was central to much of the art of the 1960s, and at the same time, it was obvious that the mechanical agewas coming to an end, that the world was about to enter a new phase. My exhibition began with Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of flying machines and ended with pieces by Nam June Paik and Tinguely. It included over 200 sculptures, constructions, paintings, and collages. We also put together a film program. Tinguely was really in love with machines, with mechanisms of any kind. He had had his breakthrough on March 17, 1960, with Hommage à New York—a self-destroying artwork. Richard Huelsenbeck, Duchamp, and myself had written for the catalogue at the time and Tinguely wanted to bring his friends Yves Klein and Raymond Hains with him to New York in 1960, but somehow it never happened.
HUO Your machine show could be thought of as a requiem to L’Homme-machine (1748), the famous book by the 18th-century philosopher [Julien Offray de] La Mettrie, about the machine age.
PH Yes—as its culmination. It was also the height of MoMA’s golden age, a period when Alfred Barr was there and René d’Harnoncourt was director of the museum.
HUO Why was it so wonderful?
PH They were both great men. For one thing, no one ever mentioned the word “budget.” Today it’s the first word you hear. There were all kinds of possibilities. When, at the 11th hour, we had to get one of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion cars from Texas, they said “Boy, that costs a lot of money,” but we got it. This was the last great exhibition of that period at MoMA. René d’Harnoncourt died in an accident shortly before the machine show opened, and Alfred Barr had retired the year before.
HUO Though there were numerous exchanges between Stockholm and the United States during your tenure at the Moderna Museet, you were the first to do big one-person shows in Europe with Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. What about the Pop art show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm [Amerikansk POPKonst (American Pop Art), 1964]; wasn’t
