Rörelse i konsten: The Art of Re-assemblage

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Notes

1. An initial comment: When I was first asked to write this paper it was my previous work dealing with Moderna Museet during the 1960s that had interested the symposium committee. The years 1961–66 have been of particular interest to me. What I have shown in my previous work is how the initial optimism and excitement that mounted around Moderna Museet's participation in the institutionalization of an international Open Art in 1961 would as early as 1962 be questioned from within its own leadership. With exhibitions such as Inner and Outer Space in 1965 and Hon-en katedral in 1966 we see attempts to reorient the museum in response to critiques levelled against its collaborations with the New York avant-garde. This essay is meant to provide a constructive pretext to this period and serve as a starting point not only to discuss how exciting and significant Moderna Museet was under the directorship of Pontus Hultén, but also help explain why the museum found itself in a precarious political situation by the mid-1960s.

2. »Pictures Reveal Fight as a Historic Thriller«, Life Magazine, 24 March 1961, p. 148.

3. Here I am particularly thinking of Thomas Crow's Rise of the Sixties, which confronts the predominantly New York-based and Paris-based accounts of this period with an askance account of the period as viewed from California. Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1996.

4. See Serge Guilbaut, »Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick«, in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990, pp. 30–79.

5. Alva Myrdal, »The Development of Population and Social Reform in Sweden«, in Ten Lectures on Swedish Architecture, eds Th.Paenge Jacobson and Sven Silow, Victor Petterson's Bokindustriaktiebolag, Stockholm, p. 19.

6. The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto described this optimism in rather purifying terms, saying that Sweden's image at the Stockholm Exhibition was »not a composition in stone, glass and steel as the Functionalist-hating exhibition visitor might imagine, but rather a composition in houses, flags, searchlights, flowers, fireworks, happy people and clean tablecloths – a whole new kind of joy«. Quoted in Richard Weston's Modernism, Phaidon, London, 1996, pp. 183–184. As Weston observes, Sweden was the first country to work itself out of the economic depression in the 1930s. This achievement, largely attributed to the Social Democrats’ willingness to embrace the large social reforms associated with folkhemmet, provided the Social Democratic government with a legacy that helped keep them in power well into the 1970s.

7. Hans L.C. Jaffé, »Geometric Abstraction: its Origin, Principles and Evolution«, in Art Since Mid-Century: The New Internationalism, Vol. 1: Abstract Art; New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, CT, 1971.

8. Eugen Wretholm, Svenska konstnärer från 1940, 50 och 60-talet, Bokförlaget Forum AB, Uddevalla, 1969, pp. 4–5.

9. An insightful discussion of the economic, military and diplomatic tensions between the United States and Europe directly after the Second World War is found in Pascaline Winand's Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe, Saint Martin's Press, New York, 1993. In particular Winand considers the idea of a »united Europe«, which was started under the Roosevelt administration and continued by Truman as a means to develop a multilateral economic plan to pave the way for liberalized trade which favoured the United States. The most visible outcomes of these plans were the 1947 Truman Doctrine, which provided economic and financial aid to Europe, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Pact. These helped to establish a divided Europe.

10. Louise Lyberg, A History of Swedish Art: 1880–1980, Bohusläningens Boktryckeri AB, Uddevalla, 1987, p. 229.

11. Art d'aujourd'hui, no. 1 (December 1951).

12. To follow the trials and tribulations of someone like Degand at this time, see Serge Guilbaut's »Dripping on the modernist parade: The failed invasion of abstract art in Brazil, 1947–48«, in Patrocinio, coleccion y circulacion de las artes, XX coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, 1997, pp. 807–817.

13. Karl G. Hultén, »Viking Eggeling«, Art d'aujourd'hui, No 7, October–November 1953, p. 3.

14. Michel Ragon, »Esthétique actuelle du Timbre-Poste«, Cimaise, March 1955, p.25.

15. Ilmar Laaban, »Analys och syntes I modern konst«, Samtid och Framtid, August 1952, p. 49.

16. Ilmar Laaban, »Abstrakt eller konkret«, Samtid och Framtid, August 1952, p. 42.

17. Ilmar Laaban, »Abstrakt eller konkret«, Samtid och Framtid, August 1952, p. 46.

18. As Thure Stenström has suggested in his survey of existentialist writing in Sweden, having been cut off to a large degree from contact with continental thought during the Second World War, many Swedes felt a need to »take back« the lost years after the borders reopened for cultural exchange. The rigor with which this »engagement« took place was often fuelled by the guilt of having to own up to the compromises made during the war while claiming neutrality. Herein lies the attempt to mark out an adherence with the Resistance in the winning democracies: »To play Sartre in a Swedish theatre could in this situation become a way to ease one's conscience, a sign that despite German–Swedish trade to Nazi weapons factories in the Ruhr one could nevertheless stand on the righteous side.« Thure Stenström, Existentialismen i Sverige: mottagande och inflytande 1900–1950, University of Stockholm, Uppsala/Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984, pp. 15–16.

19. Pontus Hultén, Jean Tinguely: Méta, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1972, p. 35.

20. Heidi E. Violand-Hobi, Jean Tinguely: Life and Early Work, Prestel, New York, 1995, p. 41.

21. Pontus Hultén, »Den ställföreträdande friheten«, Kasark No 2, October 1955, p. 1.

22. I would like to acknowledge the generous information Ulf Linde provided me with on the subject of Duchamp, Stirner and Hultén. This interview took place in Stockholm on 18 May 1999.

23. Marx and Engels, in the first draft of The German Ideology, spent two-thirds of their thesis tackling the problem of Stirner, whose argument against revolutionary socialism was decisively based in a critique of language. In the end, »Saint–Max«, as they referred to him, would be edited out of the popularized versions of their book. For more on this, see Sidney Hook's From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, Ann Arbor, 1961 (orig. pub. 1950), pp. 173–174.

24. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, Modern Library, New York, c.1940 (no date – orig. pub. 1845), p. 45.

25. Pontus Hultén, »The Blind Lottery of Reputation: or The Duchamp Effect«, Marcel Duchamp; Works and Life, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 14.

26. Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Paul Theobald, id Book, Chicago, 1947, p. 338.

27. Sandro Key-Åberg, »P.O. Ultvedt«, Konstrevy No 4 (1958).

28. To contextualize these specific films and the film festival, see Lars Gustaf Andersson, John Sundholm and Astrid Söderbergh Widding's »I skuggan av spelfilmen: svensk experimentell film«, in Konst som rörlig bild-från Diagonalsymfonin till Whiteout, ed.Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Bokförlaget Langenskiöld, Lidingö, 2006, pp. 15–94.

29. Pontus Hultén, »Fem fragment ur moderna museet's historia«, in Moderna Museet 1958–83, eds Olle Granath and Monica Nieckels, Moderna Museet Press, Stockholm, 1983, p. 35.

30. These articles are republished in Ulf Linde's book Fyra artiklar, Bonniers, Stockholm, 1965.

31. See Patrik Andersson, Euro-Pop: The Mechanical Bride Stripped Bare in Stockholm, Even, dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2001.