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.
HUO Jean Tinguely always said you should have been an artist. How did you end up running a museum?
PH In Paris, where I was writing my dissertation, I met Tinguely, Robert Breer, and some other artists who urged me to take up art making. I resisted this idea, but did make some films with Breer, who worked as an animator, and also some objects with Tinguely. To tell the truth, if I had had a chance to become a film director, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Though I managed to make some short films, I realized that the mid-1950s wasn’t a very good time to try and make features. I made a 25-minute film with a friend, but it was a great failure because the producer released it with the wrong feature film. It got some prizes, though, in Brussels and New York. I wrote a second screenplay, which I wasn’t even able to finance. It was at that point that I was offered the job of creating a national museum of modern art in Sweden.
HUO Before you were put in charge of this museum, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, you’d been organizing exhibitions for several years on your own.
PH Yes. In fact, in the early 1950s, I started curating shows at a tiny gallery that consisted of two small spaces, about 100-square meters each. Curiously enough, it was called The Collector [Samlaren, Stockholm]. The owner, Agnes Widlund, who was Hungarian, had invited me to do shows there, and she basically gave me carte blanche. I put together exhibitions with friends around themes that interested us. We did a big exhibition on Neo-Plasticism in 1951. Things were infinitely easier then. Paintings didn’t have the value they do today. You could bring a Mondrian to the gallery in a taxicab.
HUO One of your shows, held in a bookstore in 1960, was of Marcel Duchamp’s work.
PH I had done another one with pieces of his in 1956, but it wasn’t a solo show. I’d been fascinated with Duchamp since I was a teenager. He marked me very deeply. At the bookstore, we did a small show—we didn’t even have a Box-in-a-Valise (1941–1968), but managed to come up with replicas. Duchamp later signed everything. He loved the idea that an artwork could be repeated. He hated “original” artworks with prices to match. I had met Duchamp in Paris in 1954, I think. At that time, he gave an interview in an art journal in which he discussed his notion of “retinal art,” of art made only for the eye and not for the mind. It had tremendous impact; people were really hurt. The painter Richard Mortensen, who was a friend of mine, was really shattered. He had misgivings about his own work that he couldn’t express or wouldn’t accept. Then Duchamp put this idea out on the table, just like that, and it was as if someone had lifted the veil. I still have Mortensen’s letter.
HUO Walter Hopps told me that in the United States in the 1950s, Duchamp was known mainly to artists, not to the general public. What about in Europe?
PH Duchamp was much appreciated by artists because they could steal from him without risk of discovery, since he was almost unknown. At that time, Duchamp’s work had been forgotten, despite [André] Breton’s praise of him in the heyday of Surrealism and again after the war. It was in many people’s interest for Duchamp’s work to remain unknown. For obvious reasons, this was especially the case for important gallerists. But he made a comeback—it was inevitable.
HUO It was at Denise René’s Paris gallery that you organized an exhibition of Swedish art in 1953?
PH Yes. I used to go to the gallery a lot. It was one of the few places in Paris that was lively. We would gather there and talk about art every day.
HUO It sounds rather like the kind of forum created by the Surrealist magazine Littérature.
PH Unlike the Surrealists, we didn’t expel anyone, but all the same, our discussions were infected by politics. There were great debates about how to deal with Stalinism and with capitalism. Some people seemed to think Trotskyism represented a 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