PONTUS WITH FRIENDS

Pontus Hultén (1924–2006) started working at Moderna Museet in 1958 and was appointed museum director in 1962. The year before, he had created an exhibition at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam with the artists Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Per Olov Ultvedt and Jean Tinguely. The exhibition Dylaby was experimental and explored thoughts and ideas on what a museum can show and how this could be done.

Sam Francis (1923–1994) and Pontus Hultén met for the first time in Paris in 1959 when they were in their twenties. And the next year, in 1960, Hultén was able to present a retrospective with Francis abstract expressionist paintings at Moderna Museet. The exhibition had been put together by the then more well known museumdirector Franz Meyer at Kunsthalle Bern, who presented Francis during the summer. And in September the exhibition opened in Stockholm. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Pontus and Sam, which led to further close cooperations over time.

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was one of the American artists who had their first international exhibition at Moderna Museet in Sweden in 1968. He is famous for his reproductions of celebrities and familiar products. The portrait of Mao Zedong is the image of the Chinese leader that was most frequently reproduced in 1970. The clash between communist and capitalist ideas is effectively illustrated in several ways in Warhol’s artistic style.

Several of the artists Pontus Hultén worked with were his close friends. Through the exhibitions he accomplished in his lifetime, he influenced the careers of several of them. One was Niki de Saint Phalle. Her monumental sculpture of a woman with an ample figure, one of her many nanas, formed the actual exhibition space for SHE – A Cathedral in 1966. Shown here is a drawing that was donated to the museum by Hultén.

Many of these artists are now legends. Together, the museum director, the artists and their gallerists contributed to a historiography where masters and apprentices followed in each other’s footsteps, as in previous centuries. Nowadays, government employees such as the staff at Moderna Museet are not allowed to accept works from artists in the way Hultén did. It is seen as a conflict of interest, which could bias the staff in legal or decision-making situations.