Pontus Hulten, Champion Of Contemporary Art, 82
DGH
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,
France, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California,
died on Wednesday, October 25, 2006, at his home in Stockholm, Sweeden,
at the age of 82.
His death was announced by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where his
career began.
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,
Denmark, 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, France, 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 like Robert 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."
NY Times