The Moderna Museet in Stockholm – the Institution and the Avant-Garde

The Moderna Museet in Stockholm – The Institution and the Avant-Garde

Annika Öhrner

Abstract

The Moderna Museet holds a leading role in the narratives of avant-garde culture of the 1960s in Europe. It presented the very first American pop art show in a European museum, in 1964, after some years of including new American performance art, sculpture and painting in some of its shows. The museum has since continued to construct its identity around this pivotal role. This essay maps how the museum in the 1960s went out of its way to balance young neo-avant-garde art with classical modernism, while linking the one to the other, in order to meet expectations from a conservative audience. It also gives a historical perspective to the idea of a sudden introduction of American art by the Moderna Museet in the early 1960s, showing how it had already been fostered for a few decades within the framework of Swedish cultural policy, as well as within American cultural programmes.

The Moderna Museet in Stockholm played a key role in the story of avant- garde culture in the Nordic countries during the 1960s and beyond. The museum’s leader from 1958 to 1973, Pontus Hultén, had a vision of the museum as a dynamic venue for new art, and also as an important player in contemporary European art and museum life. He would later go on to the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, in Paris, where he was Director from 1974 to 1981. The introduction of new avant-garde art, and notably the art of the American neo-avant-garde, was carefully staged to win over the general public and the authorities, and to pave the way for the museum on the international scene. The Moderna Museet’s own core value was the claim to be a modern museum, working with contemporary art and living artists, and thus unique and profoundly different from any museum of historical art (Hultén 1983: 30). Photography was included from the outset, along with the tradi- tional art media of painting, prints and sculpture. Importantly, from its early days the museum also showed international film: contemporary as well as early avant-garde. However, the Moderna Museet all along showed avant-garde art alongside more classical modernism, mixing early twentieth-century modernism and

The Moderna Museet in Stockholm 113 new avant-garde works, happenings, films and concerts. The Moderna Museet thus played the double role of an avant-garde venue and, simultaneously, a museum. Often when the museum was struggling with limited resources in the 1960s, there was conflict between the Moderna Museet and the parent museum, the Nationalmuseum, and frustrated comments about the govern- ment’s outmoded view of the needs of a modern museum of contemporary art were vented. This led to subsequent misrepresentations of the genealogy of the Moderna Museet. The progressive ideas on which the museum was based were born well before the institution opened in 1958. Although the decades it took for the Swedish state to plan a modern museum in Sweden were to a large extent devoted to the problem of where and how such a museum should be housed, there was no shortage of ideas about what a modern museum could be. Some of these ideas and impulses came from the us of the 1920s and were adopted by the Swedish state in the period immediately after the war. The situ- ation of the Moderna Museet in the 1960s was the result not of one man’s inno- vations in a legendary decade but of years of local political as well as transnational cultural processes between the us and Europe. This was obscured when the image of the Moderna Museet was created in the 1960s.

The Genealogy of a Museum

In a memorandum of 1949 about the public art collections, their organisation and housing,1 in which the future of the entire collection of art belonging to the Swedish state was analysed, including a new Swedish museum of modern art, it was stated that contemporary art from the previous half-decade was the most vital and contradictory in the entire history of Western art (National museiutredningen 1949). Different tendencies in art had now started to run side by side, each movement with its own highlights.2 It was of the greatest didactic importance, the memorandum stated, that the public should get to know this art better than was possible in the small space then available within the premises of the Nationalmuseum. The idea of a contemporary museum troubled the authors of the memorandum, as it did many other museum cre- ators in Europe at the time. In accordance with the so called “Luxembourg- Louvre system”, it was proposed that art works that proved to be of lasting

1 Nationalmuseiutredningen 1949. Betänkande angående Statens konstsamlingars organisation och lokalbehov, sou 1949. 2 These ideas were also expressed in the exhibition Det moderna museet at Liljewalchs konst- hall, presenting the public collections in 1950.