Rörelse i konsten. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 17maj-3 september 1961

Beskrivning

Modern Museum, Stockholm. 1961. 33, (7) pp. + a leporello folded spread with six folds. (Moderna Museets utställningskatalog. Nr 18). (57 x 11 cm), paperback, saddle stitched with glued-in leporello. White copy (not dark-yellow as usual) from Björkman’s stock, which we bought a couple of years ago. You will never, ever again find a copy like this! Only three copies left. Cover printed in two colours, lettering in dark blue, graphic motifs, including the silhouette of Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, in black. On the title page, a facsimile of a handwritten motif by Willem Sandberg. 34 black and white illustrations. List of the exhibited works. The catalogue is divided into four sections. The first provides quotations about museum ideas and events, from Leibniz’s grandiose ideas about the museum as entertainment in 1675 to Tinguely’s self-destructing machine in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960. The second section is entitled ”Brief Lexicon of some of the artists who worked with kinetic art ”. It presents 79 artists. Most of these avant-gardists are also found in the third section, a catalogue of the exhibited works (No. 1-233 of 83 artists). On the back cover, the fourth section is pasted as a six-fold leporello with Hultén’s overview of the history of movement art. (Lutz Jahre 9 – 1961).

For seven years, Pontus Hultén, is said to have worked on the preparations for this exhibition, which reverberated around the world and became the basis for Moderna Museet’s beloved popularity. The text you provided describes a catalogue from the Modern Museum in Stockholm, published in 1961.

This presentation of kinetic art, prepared by Hulten in Stockholm, was deliberately shown first in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to introduce the exhibition to the Swedish public. The catalogue was therefore also published first in Dutch. Even in Amsterdam, which at the time had one of the best museums of modern art and a modern, open-minded public, the exhibition seemed provocative, but was a great success.

As expected, criticism was particularly strong in the Stockholm press. One of the harshest critics, the artist Sven Erixson, felt that the exhibition was an insult to the museum and to art. The chief curator of the National Museum, Carl Nordenfalk, even considered closing the exhibition due to the criticism. In an article in Dagens Nyheter, the sculptor Bror Hjorth, at the time the ”grand old man” among Swedish artists, sided with the exhibition organizers. He called the selection dignified and discreet, and even compared Tinguely to Delacroix. Both artists involved in the debate, Hjorth and Erixson, were shown in their own retrospectives (1967 and 1969) at the Moderna Museet a few years later.

The public came in droves – not least because of the great press coverage. The exhibition was perhaps the young museum’s greatest success; over 7,000 catalogues were sold during the exhibition. 233 works by 83 artists were on display, divided into a section for contemporary artists and a historical section in which works up to 1930 were on display. Happenings, light shows, film screenings and concerts took place alongside the exhibition. Large sculptures were in the city and in front of the museum. Artists such as Spoerri, Calder, Tinguely, Rauschenberg and Kaprow were actively involved in the preparations for the exhibition, some with works specially designed for it. For the presentation in Stockholm, Ulf Linde made the world’s first replica of the Large Glass, Marcel Duchamp’s main work. This copy contributed significantly to the fame that Duchamp’s work achieved in Europe in the 1960s. The artist, who was a guest in Stockholm for a week during the exhibition in August 1961, authorized this and other replicas of other works. The exhibition became a first-class event that also helped the new museum gain importance in the international art world. The catalogue (the Swedish edition was expanded) also stood out from the usual framework in terms of its format and presentation. The main part consists of biographical entries on the artists. It is preceded by texts by the artists, manifestos and reports. The enclosed leporello, printed in blue on white, contains an illustrated text by Pontus Hultén on the history of kinetic art in the 20th century.

Billy Klüver: Born in Monaco, grew up in Sweden. After completing his doctorate in Berkeley, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1966, he founded Experiments in Art and Technology together with Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman and Fred Waldhauer. Wrote the book Kiki’s Paris together with Julie Martin. I met Pontus 50 years ago at the university film club, the only truly independent cultural institution in Stockholm at the time. The first exhibition I worked on with Pontus was ”Rörelse i konsten” in 1961. Essentially, Pontus was expanding on the 1955 exhibition Le mouvement at the Galerie Denise René, for which he had written a 32-page statement on kinetic art from the Bugatti brothers to Jean Tinguely (Den ställföreträdande friheten eller om rörelse i konsten och Tinguelys metamekanik). In an interview with Swedish television at the opening of ”Rörelse i konsten”, he expressed his appreciation for Movement or dynamism in art: ”Much of modern art is pessimistic, fatalistic, negative and depressing, I think we have made an exhibition that is the opposite. It is cheerful, constructive, dynamic and full of movement.”

Before ”Rörelse i konsten”, Pontus and I had visited Calder in Roxbury, Connecticut. As we were leaving, Sandy ran after us. ”Here,” he said, pushing a small model toward a stunned Pontus, ”build this.” It was a working model of Calder’s rejected proposal for the symbol of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. At the opening, Calder got out of his taxi in front of the Moderna Museet and was as happy as a child at Christmas to see his Four Seasons, full-size and in flawless motion.

Pontus’ exhibition catalogue was 57 centimetres long and 11 centimetres wide. He imagined that it would stick out of everyone’s pocket like a baguette and that people would discover it on the streets of Stockholm as they went for a walk. A perfect example of Pontus’ wishful thinking and his instinctive ability to create propaganda for his exhibitions.

For Pontus, the catalogue was always a vehicle for extending the exhibition beyond the confines of the museum. All his catalogues had something abnormal about them, something that challenged the traditions of the printing trade. Only a man with a loyal printer, unimaginable determination and a complete disdain for cost could achieve such a thing.

Pontus’ solutions were always brilliant in tight situations, as was the case when we had only a few days to lay out and print the publication 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. I asked him to take over. He chose the large format; and rather than getting into the technical details of each artist’s project, as I would have been inclined to do, he superimposed all the technical diagrams on the cover. He did the layout for the rest of the catalogue in a few hours and got it to the printer in time. When deadlines approached, Pontus became a mountain of well-concealed impatience, a volcano.