Читать книгу A Brief History of Curating - Hans Ulrich Obrist - Страница 8

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.