Pontus Hultén

Karl Gunnar Vougt Pontus Hultén (21 June 1924 – 25 October 2006) was a Swedish art collector and museum director. Pontus Hultén is regarded as one of the most distinguished museum professionals of the twentieth century. He was the pioneering former head of the Museum for modern art in Stockholm and in the 1970s he was invited to participate in the creation of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where he was its first director in 1974-1981.

Pontus Hultén was born in ; he studied art history at and during the 1950s he was a curator at a small art gallery and also organized film screenings. In 1958, he curated the exhibition Constructivist Design at Galerie Lambert Weyl, Paris.

In 1960, Hultén was named head of the Moderna Museet, shaping the museum into a powerhouse of modern art. Under Hultén, the Moderna Museet was to be one of the most dynamic contemporary art institutions of the 1960s. During his tenure, the museum played a seminal role in bridging the gap between Europe and America, staging numerous exhibitions with works by early modern artists like Vincent van Gogh, modernists Paul Klee, René Magritte, Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky, and also Swedish artists including Sven Erixson, Bror Hjorth and Sigrid Hjertén.

Hultén organized theme exhibitions including 4 Americans in 1962 with pop artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and did solo exhibitions with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Edward Kienholz. Followed in 1964 by one of the first European surveys of American Pop art. In return, Hultén was invited to curate an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1968: his first historical and Interdisciplinary show, it explored the machine in art, photography, and industrial design.

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