A Brief History of Curating. Hans Ulrich Obrist
a place that actually encouraged the public to participate?
PH A museum director’s first task is to create a public—not just to do great shows, but to create an audience that trusts the institution. People don’t come just because it’s Robert Rauschenberg, but because what’s in the museum is usually interesting. That’s where the French Maisons de la Culture went wrong. They were really run like galleries, whereas an institution must create its public.
HUO When a museum lives through a great moment, it often becomes linked to a particular person. When people went to Stockholm, they talked of going to Hultén’s; when they went to Amsterdam, of going to Sandberg’s.
PH That’s certainly true and it leads me to another issue. The institution shouldn’t be completely identified with its director; it’s not good for the museum. Willem Sandberg knew this quite well. He asked me, as well as others, to do things at the Stedelijk [Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam], and he would remain on the sidelines. For an institution to be identified with only one person isn’t a good thing. When it breaks down, it breaks down completely. What counts is trust. You need trust if you want to present the work of artists who are not well known, as was the case when we first showed Rauschenberg’s work (part of an exhibition of four young American artists) at the Moderna Museet. Though people didn’t yet know who he was, they came anyway. But you can’t fool around with quality. If you do things for the sake of convenience, or because you’re forced to do something you don’t agree with, you’ve got to make the public believe in you all over again. You can show something weak once in a while, but not often.
HUO What were the points of departure for the shows on artistic exchanges that you organized at the Pompidou: Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris? Why do you think they were so successful?
PH I had proposed the Paris–New York show to the Guggenheim in the 1960s, but I hadn’t received a response. When I started at the Centre Georges Pompidou, I had to establish a program for the next several years. Paris–New York brought together the people from the Musée national d’art moderne and those from various other departments—it was multidisciplinary. I should have taken out a patent on the formula that allowed me to unify so many different teams at the Pompidou; this approach later became very popular. The library also participated: in the Paris–New York show, their section was separate; in Paris–Berlin everything was part of one space. With these four shows, I was also attempting to make a complex, thematic exhibition easy to follow—to be straightforward yet to raise many issues. Paris–Moscow, for instance, reflected the beginnings of Glasnost before the West knew any such thing existed.
HUO Why did you choose to stress the relationship between east and west, rather than north and south?
PH Strangely enough, the east-west axis seemed less familiar at the time. I came up with the exhibition trilogy Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, and Paris–Moscow to address the exchange between various cultural capitals in the west and those in the east. Paris–New York began with reconstructions of Gertrude Stein’s famous salon, Mondrian’s New York studio, and Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of this Century, and ended with Art Informel, Fluxus, and Pop art. Paris–Berlin, 1900–1933 was confined to the period before National Socialism, and provided a panoramic view of cultural life in the Weimar Republic—art, theater, literature, film, architecture, design, and music. For Paris–Moscow, 1900–1930, thanks to a period of détente in French-Soviet relations, I was able to assemble works produced by numerous French artists showing in Moscow before the October Revolution, as well as Constructivist, Suprematist, and even some Social Realist artworks.
The groundwork for the Paris–New York show and the shows that followed had been done before the Pompidou even opened. In the late 1970s, it was considered odd to buy American art. Thanks to Dominique de Menil and her donations of works by Pollock and other American artists, American paintings became part of Beaubourg’s collection. Before I mounted the first show in this series, I felt it was necessary to give the museum audience some historical background. Inaddition to major retrospectives of Max Ernst. André Masson, and Francis Picabia at the Grand Palais, I organized a big Vladimir Mayakovsky show at CNAC [Centre National d’Art Contemporain], the space on Rue Berryer near Place de l’Étoile. We redid Mayakovsky’s show from 1930, which he had organized in hopes of providing a multifaceted portrait of himself; shortly after, he committed suicide. For that show, Roman Cieslewicz did the graphic design and he also did the covers for the catalogues for Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris. But for Paris–New York, Larry Rivers did the cover. Those four big catalogues, which were sold out for a long time, were recently reissued in a smaller format. With that series we succeeded in establishing a good relationship with the public, because we also made conscious attempts to prepare our audience. The Centre Pompidou was embraced by the public because they felt it was for them, and not for the conservators. Conservator—what a terrible word!
HUO I agree. Who were the curators, for lack of a better term, with whom you spoke most frequently in the 1950s and 1960s?
PH Sandberg at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Knud Jensen at the Louisiana in Denmark, and Robert Giron in Brussels; once I even did a show with Jean Cassou on the paintings of August Strindberg at the Musée national d’art moderne. Sandberg and Alfred Barr—at MoMA—created the blueprint; they ran the best museums in the 1950s. I got close to Sandberg. He came to see me in Sweden, and we got on very well. He kind of adopted me, but our friendship ended on a rather sour note. He wanted me to take over from him in Amsterdam, but my wife didn’t want to move, so I decided not to.
HUO A few years later you got an offer to do an exhibition at MoMA in New York.
PH The Stedelijk adventure was over in 1962; the offer to work for MoMA came in 1967. MoMA and the Stedelijk were quite different. In New York, the structure was less open, more academic. It was more compartmentalized than at the Stedelijk, where Sandberg had succeeded in creating a fluid, lively structure. MoMA was relatively conservative because of the source of its financial support—wealthy donors. The Stedelijk had a different kind of freedom, because Sandberg was, essentially, a city employee; he could make policy as he saw fit. All he had to do was convince the mayor of Amsterdam. Catalogues, for instance, were absolutely his domain.
HUO You also put a lot of energy into your catalogues. Last year the university library in Bonn organized an impressive retrospective of about 50 of your publications [Das gedruckte Museum: Kunstausstellungen und ihre Bücher, 1953–1996, Universitäts und Landesbibliothek Bonn, 1996 (The Printed Museum of Pontus Hultén)]. Many of them seemed like extensions of your exhibitions. And some of them were really art objects in themselves: the Blandaren box from 1954–1955 had lots of artists’ multiples, or that fabulous catalogue in the form of a suitcase for the Tinguely show in Stockholm in 1972 (Jean Tinguely, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1972). You also invented the encyclopedic catalogue: 500-1000-page volumes for the Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris shows that have since become so common. So catalogues and books would seem to play a preeminent role for you as well.
PH Yes, but not as much as for Sandberg. It was from his idea of being part of the exhibition. He had his own style that he used for all his exhibitions. I am more in favor of diversification.
HUO Sandberg hosted Dylaby (Dylaby—A Dynamic Labyrinth) in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1962, and in 1966 you organized the even more interactive project Hon (She—A Cathedral) in Stockholm, a monumental reclining Nana, 28 meters long, nine meters wide, and six meters high. Could you say a bit about your collective adventure with Tinguely, Niki de St Phalle, and Per Olof Ultvedt?
PH In 1961 and 1962 I had numerous discussions with