Pentacle

Beskrivning

Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. 1968. 113 pages, without pagination, 165 black and white, 5 pasted-in colour illustrations. For each artist: catalogue, exhibition list, bibliography. (24 x 21 cm), paperback, thread-stitched, in a double-grooved cover, thumb index on the underside. Cover printed in two colours: star motif and artist name in silver embossing, lettering in black. Design: Hubert Johansson, Björkmans Eftr. (Lutz Jahre 20 – 1968).

Olle Bærtling, Öyvind Fahlström, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, Max Walter Svanberg, Per Olof Ultvedt. Technical Committee: Yolande Amic, K. G. P. Hultén, Christer Jacobson, François Mathey, Elisabeth Svenstedt.  (Preview:) François Mathey. Organized by the National Committee for Contemporary Swedish Foreign Art Exhibitions, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Institut Suédois in Paris. Exhibition: Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 18 Jan. – March 31, 1968.

The catalogue is very elaborately designed: each artist chapter contains an introductory text with a colour illustration, a comprehensive biography, a list of the works in the museum’s possession, an exhibition chronology, a bibliography and the catalogue of works, in which all of the exhibited works are illustrated.

The exhibition was organized by François Mathey, who together with Pontus Hultén selected the five contemporary Swedish artists, on the initiative of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. One criterion was that the artists should have a certain folie, a sense of the fantastic, similar to that of the great Swedish painters Josephson, Hill and Strindberg. In addition to the older artists Svanberg (surrealism) and Bærtling (concrete art), the younger generation of artists was also represented, with Fahlström, Reuterswärd and Ultvedt.

Pontus Hulten organized various exhibitions of Swedish Art abroad. He was responsible for the Swedish contribution to the biennials in São Paulo and Venice several times, for example at the 33rd Venice Biennial (1966), where Öyvind Fahlström represented Sweden. Hulten was involved in the organization of L’art suédois, an exhibition of Swedish artists in Paris (where Olle Bærtling was also represented), as early as 1953. In 1970 in Stockholm and in 1971 in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the exhibition ”Svenskt alternativ – alternative suédois” was shown, which introduced the next youngest generation of Swedish artists. In 1982, current Scandinavian art was presented under the title ”Sleeping Beauty”, among other places in the Guggenheim Museum in New York.