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Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 1964. Second and revised and expanded edition. Working committee and catalogue editor. Olle Granath, K. G. Hultén, Ulf Linde, Karin Bergqvist Lindegren. Order of Moderna Museets Vänner. (Moderna Museets utställningskatalog. Nr. 36). 79 pages, 179 black and white illustrations, 5 pasted-in colour illustrations. (24 x 17 cm), English brochure. 8-page dust jacket printed in 2 colours. Dust jacket with a small missing paper piece at the front, lower left corner. Exhibition: Stockholm, Moderna Museet, December 26, 1963 – February 16, 1964. (See Lutz Jahre 12 – 1963.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 1963. Working committee and catalogue editor. Olle Granath, K. G. Hultén, Ulf Linde, Karin Bergqvist Lindegren. Order of Moderna Museets Vänner. (Moderna Museets utställningskatalog. Nr. 36). First edition. 76 pages, 179 black and white illustrations, 5 pasted-in colour illustrations. (24 x 17 cm), English brochure. 8-page dust jacket printed in 2 colours. Dust jacket with a short tear at front cover lower part. Exhibition: Stockholm, Moderna Museet, December 26, 1963 – February 16, 1964 (44,000 visitors). (Lutz Jahre 12 – 1963.
At the time of its opening, the Moderna Museet had around 2,000 works. The annual purchasing budget was too small to be able to buy important works on the market. The collection was supplemented by purchases from young artists, donations and sometimes unusual measures: a work by Jean Tinguely only started moving when money was inserted. The proceeds were used for new purchases. ”The Moderna Museets Vänner”, a circle of friends of the museum with around 1800 members, had made major purchases possible in the past, including works by Gris, Mondrian, Schwitters, Brancusi, Calder and Tàpies. The circle of friends also organized the Önskemuseet exhibition.
The idea behind the exhibition was simple and unique: the starting point was the works that already belonged to the museum. This part, about a third of the exhibition, was supplemented with loans so that a dream museum, an ideal collection, was created in which the most important periods of modern art were represented with important works – from Fauvism to Nouveau Réalisme. The loans came mainly from collectors, artists and dealers and were therefore available for purchase. The hope of acquiring as many of these works as possible for the collection was fulfilled by a small miracle: after seeing the exhibition, the Minister of Culture made 5,000,000 SEK available, an unimaginably high sum, since the museum’s regular budget at the time was 100,000 SEK. This even made it possible to purchase some very important key works, such as Cerveau de l’enfant by de Chirico (owned by André Breton), Picasso’s cubist collage Bouteille, verre et violin (previous owner was Tristan Tzara) and Schwitters’s worker picture. A total of 28 works were acquired, including works by Dali, Ernst, Magritte, Giacometti, Dubuffet, González, Laurens, Miró, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rauschenberg and Francis. The following were donated: Works by Matisse, Braque and Picasso were added to the collection. Thanks to this unusual exhibition, the holdings of the five-year-old Moderna Museet had achieved a quality that could easily compare with other European museums of modern art. Today is the collection worth at least 5 billion SEK. So you could say it was a good affair.
Knud W. Jensen. Former director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk. Denmark. Traveling with Pontus:
”Then you went to New York, where you felt at home. Together with Billy Klüver, in whose townhouse we lived, we visited most of the pioneering artists in New York at the time. We were invited to dinner at Jasper Johns’, whose work you had just shown in the exhibition ”4 amerikanare” at the Moderna Museet. At Castelli you bought Monogram, Rauschenberg’s early major work. He had won the Biennale’s grand prize the previous summer, 1964. We didn’t talk much about money, but I remember Leo asking for $28,000, which you accepted, but not without asking what the work would have cost if you had bought it at your exhibition in Stockholm. $3,500, Leo said, but that was once!’ And so it was. But how many important works did you buy for your museum in those years! A masterpiece of an exhibition was ”Önskemuseet”, for which you, in collaboration with Ulf Linde, had brought together works that were for sale from collectors or in galleries. The Swedish government was persuaded to grant you 5,000,000 kronor (a very large sum at the time) to make purchases at the exhibition. And what purchases they were! Many holes in your collection were filled in one fell swoop – that’s what every museum worker dreams of. Your line was always clear: revolutionary art since Cubism, Duchamp, Dadaism, de Chirico, Surrealism and after the Second World War: Nouveau réalisme, Tinguely, Neodada and Pop Art! But back to New York. Do you remember when we visited Andy Warhol at the Factory, where Andy showed us his Disaster paintings, the series of works that later became the trophies of major museums and collectors? While we watched as picture after picture was brought in, young bronze-skinned men were doing trapeze gymnastics in the large loft, and assistants and secretaries were busily running back and forth; it was the heyday of the Factory when the films were also being made.
At the end of the trip, when I was tired and complaining about having to go to a party at John Cage’s on the last night, you fortunately persuaded me to come with you. Cage and his friends had spent the whole day looking for mushrooms and cooked a wonderful meal out of them, which we survived to enjoy.
Thank you, Pontus, an old comet in the art sky of our century, you are still fully visible! Thank you for your friendship and our camaraderie back in the 60s, when the world was new to all of us.
Now I’m missing your memoirs. You owe us those because you’ve been through so much, more than most of us back then, although we have no reason to complain. And you still hold your ground as the best man on the prairie.
Congratulations, old sheriff, and best regards from Knud. Humlebæk, 31 October 1995″.
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