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Moderna museet's legendary founder Pontus Hultén, photographed by Mikael Jansson for Stockholm New, winter 1998

Pontus is dead – long live his memory!

Claes Britton | Nov 14, 2006 | 0 comments

It was a couple of weeks ago when we heard the news that Pontus Hultén, the legendary founder of Stockolm's world famous Moderna museet – widely acknowledged as one of the world's leadig museums for 20th century art – had passed away. There have been some articles in the papers since, but far too few and too shallow to be concerning one of Sweden's greatest cultural figures of the last century. I knew from before that Pontus Hultén was less than popular among the Swedish cultural establishment. He was a bit too large, a bit too uninterested in false modesty and political correctness to suite some of these people. He didn't really need to occupy himself with such matters or worry about what people in his home town thought about him, exiled in France since more than thirty years back as he was. We are, after all, talking about the founding Director of not only Stockholm's Moderna museet and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but also of a number of other leading art institutions all around the world – one of the international art world's brightest stars, who was also the artistic leader of the World Exhibition in Paris celebrating the 200-year anniversary of the French revolution.

In the stern mid winter of 1998, I interviewed Pontus Hultén for a full ten hours, for an extensive article in our magazine Stockholm New, proceeding the re-opening of Moderna museet in its present, troubled and scandalous new premises. After the last interview session, I, Pontus and graphic designer Henrik Nygren walked from Grand Hotel over to the adjacent Skeppsholmen island, where the new museum was under construction. When we reached the top of the hill and caught eye of the construction site, Pontus immediately cried out: ”Oh no, have they put it on the north slope! That's a catastrophic mistake! I'm grown up in northern Lidingö, and I know these steep archipelago islands. To put a building of this magnitude on a north slope such as this is simply impossible”. As so often, Pontus was more sober and clear in his analysis than anyone else through this whole process. It wouldn't take long before his simple profecy came true when the charmless new musem, designed by celebrated Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, had to close for a year and a half, less than two years after its inaugration, to undergo massive and extremely costly reconstructions to save it from an aggressive attack of mold, caused by the water constantly flooding down the steep cliffs of that cold, dark northern slope...

I think this interview is well worth reading, both educative and highly entertaining. In it, you can really feel the wind from the wings of modern history. That's why we've made the text available in it's entirety in my text archive under portfolio on this website. Have a nice read!

Pontus is dead – long live his memory!

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