Pontus Hultén was active at Moderna Museet in the years 1958-1973 and took over as director in 1960. During his era, Moderna Museet became an experimental powerhouse for all possible artistic expressions and attracted a wider audience.

Hultén dreamed that art would play a greater role in the development of society, and during his time as director the Modern Museum became a part of the Swedish social experiment. 

Let in popular movements 

Hultén opened the museum doors for various movements: the peace movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement.

He introduced the new generation of artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg with the famous goat, Robert Jones but also Andy Warhol Roy Lichtenstein, long before they became big in the United States. 

- He was the big name in the international art arena.

After what he had done at the Moderna Museet, he was an obvious candidate for the Center Georges-Pompidou when it was to be opened.  

After the success in Paris with a retrospective Dali exhibition that attracted a record audience, Pontus Hultén had to help build four more monumental art museums: the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn in Germany, the Palazzo Grassi art museum in Venice in Italy and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in the USA and Switzerland.

Pontus Hultén was also the first director of the Museum Tinuely in Basel, Switzerland, which opened in 1996. 

An export product 

- It became a kind of export product that he traveled around and set up in different places, says author Claes Britton. 

During his long professional life, with his clear visual vision and his great interest in history and politics, he helped shape the art museums of the new era.

Pontus Hulten died in 2006, aged 82, but is still admired and disputed today.

In Sweden, however, he is perhaps best remembered because, in connection with an exhibition in Saint Petersburg in 1990, he had copies of Andy Warhol's infamous Brillo boxes manufactured without permission, which were resold with forged "certificates of authenticity".

See the report on Pontus Hultén in the clip.