Jean Tinguely »Méta«

Beskrivning

Frankfurt, Berlin, Wien. Ullstein/Propyläen Verlag, Moderna Museet, 1972. The standard edition. Eds..: Berit Tärnlund, Katja Waldén. (31x 22 cm). 363 pages, 508 black and white, 18 colour illustrations, some full-page. Bibliography, index. Cover in colour-printed fabric based on a motif by Jean Tinguely. 6 folding plates and 20 bound parchment pages. Design: Pontus Hulten, Gösta Svensson. (See Lutz Jahre 26 – 1972)

Pontus Hulten took a sabbatical in 1971 to be relieved of the daily business of the museum and to find time for special projects. In the Torpedo Institute, a former naval building near the Moderna Museet, he worked for a year on his Tinguely biography, which was then published in book trade in Germany and Sweden in 1972. A Tinguely exhibition was organized jointly with the Danish Louisiana Museum (Humlebæk, 1973) and the Moderna Museet (Stockholm, October 7th – December 3rd, 1972). Instead of a catalogue, only a leaflet was published in Stockholm, since the extensive biography was already available on the book market. The book went far beyond the possibilities of an exhibition publication, and Hultén, as a friend of the artist and an expert on the work, was ideally placed to realize such a project. The chronologically structured book is characterized by its great information value and its remarkable design. Not least because of the wealth of illustrations, carefully researched data and the numerous facsimiles of source documents, the monograph was considered for a long time to be the best standard work on Jean Tinguely.

Although over 30,000 visitors saw the exhibition in Stockholm and Tinguely was a widely respected artist, the book was not a commercial success. In his introduction, Hultén wrote: ”I hope to write an even more comprehensive book about Jean Tinguely at some point.” This wish came true in 1987: an expanded and updated version was published as an exhibition catalogue (No. 42) for the Tinguely exhibition in the Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Hultén retained the striking motif of the bag in a modified form: the book was in a slipcase with a shoulder strap.