Pontus Hultén

Karl Gunnar Vougt Pontus Hultén (21 June 1924 – 26 October 2006) was a Swedish art collector and museum director.

During his tenure, the museum played a seminal role in bridging the gap between Europe and America, staging numerous exhibitions with works by early modern artists like Vincent van Gogh, modernists Paul Klee, René Magritte, Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky, and also Swedish artists including Sven Erixson, Bror Hjorth and Sigrid Hjertén.

The museum won international fame in 1966 with the exhibition SHE – A Cathedral, which consisted of a gigantic sculpture of a reclining woman whose womb was an entrance for visitors who could experience various things inside.

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.

In 1984–1990, he was in charge of Palazzo Grassi in Venice, 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.

[5] Pontus Hultén defined the museum as an elastic and open space, hosting a plethora of activities within its walls: lectures, film series, concerts, and debates.

Hultén always maintained a very special dialogue with artists, establishing lifelong friendships with Sam Francis, Jean Tinguely, Greg Colson and Niki de St. Phalle, whose careers he not only followed but shaped from the start.