right up against a very small section of Egyptian art. But Egypt interposes—you can’t get into the Central and Western European section, or to Greco-Roman culture, from Africa without going through Egypt. It makes a kind of sense. So just in terms of people’s priorities, conventional hierarchies begin to shift some. But I mean beyond that—where special presentations can jump around in time and space, in ways we just don’t do now. I really believe in these kinds of shows.
Pontus Hultén
Born in 1924 in Stockholm, where he died in 2006.
The interview was conducted in 1996 in Paris. It was first published in Artforum, New York, April, 1997, under the title “The Hang of It–Museum Director Pontus Hultén.”
It was originally introduced by the following text:
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 Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris, which Hultén described as a cross between the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College.
Artistic director of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn, from 1991–1995, he now heads the Jean Tinguely museum in Basel, Switzerland, where he curated the inaugural exhibition. Currently writing his memoirs and a book on his years at Beaubourg, Hultén met with me in his Paris apartment to talk about his lifework at the center of the art world.
HUO Jean Tinguely always said you should have been an artist. How did you end up running a museum?
PH In Paris, where I was writing my dissertation, I met Tinguely, Robert Breer, and some other artists who urged me to take up art making. I resisted this idea, but did make some films with Breer, who worked as an animator, and also some objects with Tinguely. To tell the truth, if I had had a chance to become a film director, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Though I managed to make some short films, I realized that the mid-1950s wasn’t a very good time to try and make features. I made a 25-minute film with a friend, but it was a great failure because the producer released it with the wrong feature film. It got some prizes, though, in Brussels and New York. I wrote a second screenplay, which I wasn’t even able to finance. It was at that point that I was offered the job of creating a national museum of modern art in Sweden.
HUO Before you were put in charge of this museum, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, you’d been organizing exhibitions for several years on your own.
PH Yes. In fact, in the early 1950s, I started curating shows at a tiny gallery that consisted of two small spaces, about 100-square meters each. Curiously enough, it was called The Collector [Samlaren, Stockholm]. The owner, Agnes Widlund, who was Hungarian, had invited me to do shows there, and she basically gave me carte blanche. I put together exhibitions with friends around themes that interested us. We did a big exhibition on Neo-Plasticism in 1951. Things were infinitely easier then. Paintings didn’t have the value they do today. You could bring a Mondrian to the gallery in a taxicab.
HUO One of your shows, held in a bookstore in 1960, was of Marcel Duchamp’s work.
PH I had done another one with pieces of his in 1956, but it wasn’t a solo show. I’d been fascinated with Duchamp since I was a teenager. He marked me very deeply. At the bookstore, we did a small show—we didn’t even have a Box-in-a-Valise (1941–1968), but managed to come up with replicas. Duchamp later signed everything. He loved the idea that an artwork could be repeated. He hated “original” artworks with prices to match. I had met Duchamp in Paris in 1954, I think. At that time, he gave an interview in an art journal in which he discussed his notion of “retinal art,” of art made only for the eye and not for the mind. It had tremendous impact; people were really hurt. The painter Richard Mortensen, who was a friend of mine, was really shattered. He had misgivings about his own work that he couldn’t express or wouldn’t accept. Then Duchamp put this idea out on the table, just like that, and it was as if someone had lifted the veil. I still have Mortensen’s letter.
HUO Walter Hopps told me that in the United States in the 1950s, Duchamp was known mainly to artists, not to the general public. What about in Europe?
PH Duchamp was much appreciated by artists because they could steal from him without risk of discovery, since he was almost unknown. At that time, Duchamp’s work had been forgotten, despite [André] Breton’s praise of him in the heyday of Surrealism and again after the war. It was in many people’s interest for Duchamp’s work to remain unknown. For obvious reasons, this was especially the case for important gallerists. But he made a comeback—it was inevitable.
HUO It was at Denise René’s Paris gallery that you organized an exhibition of Swedish art in 1953?
PH Yes. I used to go to the gallery a lot. It was one of the few places in Paris that was lively. We would gather there and talk about art every day.
HUO It sounds rather like the kind of forum created by the Surrealist magazine Littérature.
PH Unlike the Surrealists, we didn’t expel anyone, but all the same, our discussions were infected by politics.
