VENICE, ITALY.-The masterpieces of the Pontus Hulten collection are the protagonists of the exhibition produced and organized by Arthemisia, on view through 9 July 2006 at Palazzo Franchetti of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. Curated by Pontus Hulten and Stefano Cecchetto, the exhibition has been conceived in collaboration with the Moderna Museet of Stockholm to document one of the most significant traits of the great art historian: his phenomenal ability to be exactly where history is being made. The exhibition is a tribute to his career; after the celebrations in 2004 at the Moderna Museet of Stockholm and at the Centre Georges Pompidou of Paris, now Venice. With this exhibition, the third important city along Pontus Hulten’s professional path pays homage to this spokesperson of the international artistic panorama who made Palazzo Grassi world famous between the mid-eighties and early nineties.

Pontus Hulten was already in Paris by 1946, consolidating the roots of modernism: there he discovered the art of Marcel Duchamp, was a dear friend to Constantin Brancusi and Jean Tinguely and witnessed the emergence of a new world after the second world conflict. Ten years later, in 1957, he was in the United States, observing how the supremacy of abstract expressionism was about to be challenged by a new generation of socially engaged artists capable of producing art closely tied to reality, far from the spaces of the galleries and closer to the street. Pontus Hulten became famous to an international public for his great exhibitions, among which the historic Movement in Art, American Pop Art and the first monographic exhibition dedicated to Andy Warhol. After leaving the direction of the Moderna Museet of Stockholm, he inaugurated and directed the Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris from 1973 to 1981, and then went on to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Palazzo Grassi in Venice from its opening in 1986 until 1993, the Kunstund Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn and the Museum Tinguely in Basel. His personal collection of artworks, formed largely by gifts from artists, best represents the course of this artistic protagonist in the fertile and tormented twentieth century.

The Venetian exhibition presents more than one hundred works selected from the prestigious personal collection of the art historian. The works are ordered into three sections that mark the typology of his artistic choices.