viable alternative. There were people like Jean Dewasne (considered at the time to be a young Vasarely) who tended to take the communists’ side. He was practically excluded from our circle. Eventually he left the gallery. We also engaged in numerous debates about abstraction, which were central to our discussions. Sometimes the great Modernist figures would come by, like Alexander Calder when he was in Paris, or Auguste Herbin, Jean Arp, and Sonia Delaunay. It was very exciting to meet them.
HUO Were there other significant galleries?
PH There were two galleries then. Denise René was by then the most important one. She was wise enough to show not just the abstract “avant-garde,” but also Picasso and Max Ernst. Then there was Galerie Arnaud, on the Rue du Four, which basically showed lyrical abstraction. Jean-Robert Amaud had a journal called Cimaise, it was where I first encountered Tinguely’s work. His art was shown in the gallery’s bookshop. Gallery bookshops were a way of exhibiting the work of young artists without making a financial commitment. You have to understand how differently galleries operated then. Prestigious spaces usually showed artists with whom they had contracts.
HUO Didn’t Alexandre Jolas also run a gallery?
PH Yes, a few years later. In his own way, he was much wilder. I couldn’t say whether or not he provided artists with stipends —Denise René’s artists got serious money. With Alexandre, things changed a lot. There was a kind of looseness that mirrored life in the 1960s.
HUO During your early years as a museum director in Stockholm you combined various art forms—dance, theater, film, painting, and so on. Later this approach became central to your large-scale exhibitions, first in New York and then in Paris, Los Angeles, and Venice. How did you settle on this working method?
PH I discovered that artists like Duchamp and Max Ernst had made films, written a lot, and done theater, and it seemed completely natural to me to mirror this interdisciplinary aspect of their work in museum shows of any number of artists, as I did several times, but particularly in Art in Motion in 1961 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm). One person who influenced me greatly was Peter Weiss, who was a close friend of mine and was known primarily for his plays such as Marat/Sade (1963) and his three-volume treatise Aesthetic of Resistance [Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, I–1975, II–1978, III–1981]. Peter was a filmmaker in addition to being a writer; he also painted and made collages. All of that was perfectly natural; for him it was all the same thing. So when Robert Bordaz—the first president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris—asked me to create shows that combined theater, dance, film, painting, and so on, I had no trouble doing so.
HUO Looking at your program in Stockholm in the 1950s and 1960s, you put on an impressive number of exhibitions despite very modest budgets. It reminds me of what Alexander Dorner, director of the Landesmusem, Hannover, from 1923 to 1936, said—that museums should be Kraftwerke, dynamic powerhouses, capable of spontaneous change.
PH That level of activity was quite natural, and corresponded to a need. People were capable of coming to the museum every evening; they were ready to absorb everything we could show them. There were times when there was something on every night. We had many friends who were working in music, dance, and theater, for whom the museum represented the only available space, since opera houses and theaters were out of the question—their work was viewed as too “experimental.” So interdisciplinarity came about all by itself. The museum became a meeting ground for an entire generation.
HUO The museum was a place to spend time in, a place that actually encouraged the public to participate?
PH A museum director’s first task is to create a public—not just to do great shows, but to create an audience that trusts the institution. People don’t come just because it’s Robert Rauschenberg, but because what’s in the museum is usually interesting. That’s where the French Maisons de la Culture went wrong. They were really run like galleries, whereas an institution must create its public.
HUO When a museum lives through a great moment, it often becomes linked to a particular person. When people went to Stockholm, they talked of going to Hultén’s; when they went to Amsterdam, of going to Sandberg’s.
PH That’s certainly true and it leads me to another issue. The institution shouldn’t be completely identified with its director; it’s not good for the museum. Willem Sandberg knew this quite well. He asked me, as well as others, to do things at the Stedelijk [Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam], and he would remain on the sidelines. For an institution to be identified with only one person isn’t a good thing. When it breaks down, it breaks down completely. What counts is trust. You need trust if you want to present the work of artists who are not well known, as was the case when we first showed Rauschenberg’s work (part of an exhibition of four young American artists) at the Moderna Museet. Though people didn’t yet know who he was, they came anyway. But you can’t fool around with quality. If you do things for the sake of convenience, or because you’re forced to do something you don’t agree with, you’ve got to make the public believe in you all over again. You can show something weak once in a while, but not often.
HUO What were the points of departure for the shows on artistic exchanges that you organized at the Pompidou: Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris? Why do you think they were so successful?
PH I had proposed the Paris–New York show to the Guggenheim in the 1960s, but I hadn’t received a response. When I started at the Centre Georges Pompidou, I had to establish a program for the next several years. Paris–New York brought together the people from the Musée national d’art moderne and those from various other departments—it was multidisciplinary. I should have taken out a patent on the formula that allowed me to unify so many different teams at the Pompidou; this approach later became very popular. The library also participated: in the Paris–New York show, their section was separate; in Paris–Berlin everything was part of one space. With these four shows, I was also attempting to make a complex, thematic exhibition easy to follow—to be straightforward yet to raise many issues. Paris–Moscow, for instance, reflected the beginnings of Glasnost before the West knew any such thing existed.
HUO Why did you choose to stress the relationship between east and west, rather than north and south?
PH Strangely enough, the east-west axis seemed less familiar at the time. I came up with the exhibition trilogy Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, and Paris–Moscow to address the exchange between various cultural capitals in the west and those in the east. Paris–New York began with reconstructions of Gertrude Stein’s famous salon, Mondrian’s New York studio, and Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of this Century, and ended with Art Informel, Fluxus, and Pop art. Paris–Berlin, 1900–1933 was confined to the period before National Socialism, and provided a panoramic view of cultural life in the Weimar Republic—art, theater, literature, film, architecture, design, and music. For Paris–Moscow, 1900–1930, thanks to a period of détente in French-Soviet relations, I was able to assemble works produced by numerous French artists showing in Moscow before the October Revolution, as well as Constructivist, Suprematist, and even some Social Realist artworks.
The groundwork for the Paris–New York show and the shows that followed had been done before the Pompidou even opened. In the late 1970s, it was considered odd to buy American art. Thanks to Dominique de Menil and her donations of works by Pollock and other American artists, American paintings became
