The artist-as-curator hardly causes a stir anymore. And while curators who make the opposite move and show work under their own name still provoke some vitriol, even their transgression is considered banal by now. Yet artists transforming themselves into academic art historians is a much rarer phenomenon, and therefore noteworthy.
This is precisely what Andreas Gedin, with a doctorate in fine arts under his belt, sets out to do in his book Pontus Hultén, Hon & Moderna (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Langenskiöld, 2016), the result of several years of research at Södertörn University College outside Stockholm. In its scope and ambition, the book is a ‘proper’ art historical study. The field of research is well defined (perhaps too well, but let me come back to that), the footnoting conscientious, the theoretical asides pertinent and the fact-finding thorough (including some 30 interviews with people who knew and collaborated with Hultén). Gedin’s approach to his topic is broader and sharper – and thus more speculative – than we can usually expect from a biography of a significant cultural figure who passed away only ten years ago.
As I read the author’s three-part account of Hultén’s life and work – ‘Towards Hon, en katedral’, ‘Hon, a Woman and an Event’, ‘Beyond Hon, en katedral’ – I often found myself reflecting that his art-specific thinking is shining through. Gedin has a good instinct for eloquent detail and writes the book as a collage of incidents and insights rather than a series of questions and answers. One of the facts he unearths is the work-in-progress that Hultén, incidentally, kept in his office at Moderna Museet: a large collage to which he continuously added various scraps of what was happening around him.
Gedin, I occasionally sense, is perhaps not entirely at ease with the purposely dry but versatile language that has traditionally been the pride of Swedish scholarship on art and culture. This is not necessarily a problem, since new approaches to research should foster innovative uses of linguistic resources, but everyone writing about art in Swedish should know the hidden difficulties of translating contemporary terms (‘curatorial practice’, anyone?) from international English.
Gedin is duly impressed with what is truly impressive about his object of study, ‘probably the single most influential Swedish modern art professional in the second half of the twentieth century’, but he also displays a healthy scepticism towards the ambiguous personality of Karl Gunnar Vougt Hultén (‘Pontus’ was originally a family nickname) and encourages his many interlocutors to perform on their own terms. Another ambiguous personality, also associated with Moderna Museet in its heyday, was the critic and curator Ulf Linde, who offered some of the most refreshing quotes before passing away in 2013. When speaking about Hultén, Linde could indeed be ‘somewhat acidic’:
He could never submit to the impulses that were supposed to come from the music. No, he decided how he wanted to dance, and then he didn’t give a damn about the music or the girl. It was just him: boom, boom, boom… It’s a detail, but it comes back to me now, as something important to me, that he was a bloody awful dancer…
I’m not sure that a self-identified art historian would have let such a paragraph survive the editing process, but again I find it refreshing that Gedin exercises his own judgment about what is relevant and correct. The quote is culled from the perhaps most important chapter in the book, titled ‘The Pragmatic Anarchist’. It casts light on the power relations around Moderna Museet in the years before 1966, when Hultén and his co-creators – Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, P O Ultvedt and to some extent Ulf Linde – let Hon, en katedral go off as an acceptably provocative bomb. (Incredible as it may seem 50 years later, Helsingborgs Dagblad, a newspaper in the south of Sweden, celebrated Hon as ‘an infinitely honourable whore’.)
Gedin notes that Hon was being covertly constructed as Hultén’s nominal superior Carl Nordenfalk, Director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, was getting ready to inaugurate his lavish exhibition dedicated to Queen Christina! He describes how a visionary ‘fixer’ like Hultén was able to secure ever-increasing state funding for his comparatively subversive activities through his direct contacts with the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs, bypassing the National Museum, and how Ulf Linde, without being employed at Moderna Museet, contributed to its programming and made exhibitions that he also reviewed in Dagens Nyheter, the country’s leading daily newspaper. This all seems to have been fine during Sweden’s years of unsurpassed economic growth and optimism and social coherence, until the events of 1968 and the domination of Dagens Nyheter’s cultural pages by home-grown Maoists made the museum’s ‘men at play’ (the director, the predominantly foreign artists, the bourgeois core audience) come across as ever so slightly obsolete.
Some pawns had to be sacrificed to keep the wheels turning. Perhaps it wasn’t pure coincidence that the American experimental filmmaker Jack Smith was one of them. His Flaming Creatures from 1963 was scheduled for a screening in the Moderna Museet cinema theatre that same year, but after it was reported to the police for indecency, and after a phone call from the Ministry, Hultén replaced it with Andy Warhol’s Sleep. Smith’s challenge to good heterosexual taste was of a kind that couldn’t be ignored.
‘Squeezed’ between a radicalised younger generation and the formalisation of the Social Democrats’ cultural policy, Hultén responded to the changing times by making exhibitions such as Poetry Must Be Made by All! Transform the World! (1969) and Utopias and Visions, 1871–1981 (1971). He hired the young Pär Stolpe, who had just created scandal with the exhibition The Image of Sweden Abroad for the inauguration of the Sweden House in Stockholm, and he planned to move the museum to the city’s new House of Culture at Sergels Torg. Gedin makes it clear that the negotiations with the elected members of the City Council were more troublesome for Hultén than the informal relations to the high-flying civil servants at the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs. A class perspective might be appropriate. The Swedish service nobility had been loyal to the Social Democrats for quite a while. Yet this governmental elite probably didn’t always demand that modern art should have popular appeal and be accessible to working people.
Gedin doesn’t skip over Hultén’s conspicuous lack of interest in the figurative, politically progressive art of the 1930s and ’40s favoured by the workers’ movement, with the mildly expressionist painter (and former professor at the Royal University College of Art) Sven Erixson as an instructive example. Already past his prime when Moderna Museet was inaugurated in 1958, he ruffled feathers by speaking up for himself and his own generation. But Gedin’s book moves beyond reflection on eternal Swedish topics such as personal politics versus bureaucratic efficiency, daring self-promotion versus elusive caution, or how over-reliance on the internationally important eventually (and almost invariably) brings about a provincial backlash. It attempts an in-depth analysis of Hultén’s understanding of art and makes two conclusions: that ‘movement in art’ was a sincere preoccupation (with tangible aesthetic and political side-effects for him and those around him) and that the account of Hultén at Moderna Museet is incomplete if we don’t consider his academic background – even if Hultén the art historian emerged fully only with the large exhibitions at Centre Pompidou in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Paris–New York (1977), Paris–Berlin (1978), Paris–Moscou (1979), Les Réalismes (1980), Paris 1937–Paris 1957 (1981).
I’ve already hinted that the story of Hon, en katedral might be seen as a somewhat narrow framing of Hultén’s achievement and significance. Yes, the giant woman prostrate on the floor of the entrance hall at Moderna Museet (‘and bloody shapeless as well’, to quote the sculptor Sivert Lindblom, as Gedin does) was a hit with the public (90,000 visitors, still only a bit more than a third of those who saw Queen Christina the same summer), and perhaps the most mediatised Swedish art event ever (Gedin foregrounds Hans Hammarskjöld’s iconic colour photographs). Yes, Hon was reported and reviewed by the international press and has also been a research topic outside of Sweden. But when we go to the ‘Bible’ of US scholarship on twentieth-century art – Hal Foster’s, Rosalind Krauss’s, Yve-Alain Bois’s and Benjamin H D Buchloh’s Art after 1900 – we search in vain for Hon, although Niki de Saint Phalle gets mentioned three times, but without any illustration. (Hultén, by the way, is not mentioned at all, but then we should remember that the authors dedicate the entire chapter on 1977, the year when Centre Pompidou was inaugurated, to the Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in New York).
Why does Gedin let his narrative die away so soon after Hon? Why don’t we get to know more about the time before and after Hultén moved to Paris in the autumn of 1973, as the exhibition New York Collection for Stockholm was making waves in a city and a country very critical of the US? The last of the three parts of this book could have been the most interesting one. I, for instance, have often wondered why Philip von Schantz – a still-life painter best known for his painstaking, Andrew Wyeth-esque renderings of pyramidal heaps of blueberries and lingonberries on rustic-looking tabletops – was chosen as Hultén’s successor at Moderna Museet. Of course the blueberries had been exhibited in New York, but still… Gedin doesn’t mention von Schantz at all (but he does publish a photograph of him and his wife in conversation with the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Krister Wickman, at the opening of New York Collection for Stockholm). It would also have been worthwhile to have an analysis of Hultén’s exhibitions at Centre Pompidou from a Swedish perspective. Did they have any impact back in Stockholm? Were they reviewed in Dagens Nyheter?
These are notes in the margins of a solid book. Gedin’s sense of scale and proportion serves him well. He knows how to make the Swedish segments of Hultén’s biography come alive and how to justly assess his leading role in the cultural life of a dynamic period. When the embarrassing Brillo Box affair finally has to be unpacked, this is done with objectivity and economy of means. It even allows the author to ‘do a Hitchcock’. The illustration on page 276 shows ‘the fake Brillo Boxes installed as part of Moderna museet’s collection in 2006, before the fakery was discovered’. If we look closer we can decipher the wall text in the background: ‘The 1st at Moderna: Andreas Gedin: Retake of an Old House.’
