Pontus Hultén, the young director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, was eager to include Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23) in his first major exhibition, Rörelse i konsten (Movement in art), in 1961.1 The work had shattered in transit years earlier and was too fragile to leave the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but Duchamp had approved the making of a full-scale replica. The task fell to a brilliant young critic who shared Hultén’s enthusiasm for Duchamp’s work: Ulf Linde.
Linde had made his name in his early twenties playing vibraphone for Sweden’s leading jazz bands, but he was just starting out as an art writer. (He quit jazz because he couldn’t tolerate touring.) If he seems an unlikely candidate to make the first replica of one of the most challenging works of modern art, consider the arrangements for the five-day visit of Marcel and his wife Teeny Duchamp to Stockholm shortly before the exhibition closed. They stayed in a room that Linde used for writing, down the hall from the two-room apartment he shared with his wife on the outskirts of central Stockholm. “One bed was fine,” Linde recalled, “but the other was a rickety cot. Duchamp looked at it and said that his own wasn’t much better.” After dropping their bags, the visitors accompanied Linde to the museum, where the artist saw Linde’s replica and was momentarily stunned: “It’s amusing,” he said, “but I never thought of the Glass as not being broken.”2
Duchamp and Linde together completed the last major element of the work, and their friendship continued by mail after Duchamp left Stockholm. For a gallery exhibition in the city in April 1963, Linde commissioned replicas of several of Duchamp’s readymades, three of which would reappear later that year in Walter Hopps’s landmark Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, California.3 The others were shown in 1964 at Arturo Schwarz’s gallery in Milan, which issued editions based on Linde’s prototypes. In short, the young Swede played a key role in the flowering of Duchamp’s career in the years before his death, in 1968.4 Linde went on to collaborate with the curator Jean Clair on the major Duchamp exhibition that was one of the shows with which the Centre Pompidou, Paris opened its doors, in 1977. In 1991–92, again at Hultén’s request, he led the making of a second replica of the Glass, though thanks to his distaste for airplanes and boats he never crossed the Atlantic to see the original. Both replicas are in the collection of Moderna Museet.
I was a Duchamp fan in my youth, so I had heard of Ulf Linde—vaguely. Then I fell in love with a Swede (we’re married now) and I began to learn a bit about the culture. I was flabbergasted to discover the scope of Linde’s very substantial achievements and writings, quite apart from his involvement with Duchamp.
In 1963 and 1964, for example, Linde was instrumental in organizing Önskemuseet (The Museum of Our Wishes), which brought to Moderna Museet the core of its outstanding modern collection, including works by Francis Bacon, Giacomo Balla, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Vasily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, René Magritte, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others.5 Beginning in 1977, he spent two very busy decades as director of Stockholm’s Thielska Galleriet, thoroughly reinvigorating that great collection of Nordic art circa 1900. Also in 1977, Linde was elected to Svenska Akademien (the Swedish academy), becoming one of the few members in the history of that august body whose principal field of expertise was the visual arts.
Linde published prodigiously throughout his career but the vast bulk of his considerable output was until recently available only in Swedish—effectively invisible to most readers outside Scandinavia. In 2012, my partner, Kerstin Lind Bonnier, and I set out to edit and translate an anthology spanning Linde’s writings. He enthusiastically approved the project before he died, in October 2013, and his widow, Nina Öhman, continued in the same spirit. Thanks to the publishers Walther and Franz König, Ulf Linde: Essays from a Lifetime in the Arts appeared last year, with an indispensable introduction by Olle Granath, former director of both Moderna Museet and Sweden’s Nationalmuseum.6
Linde agreed with Osip Mandelstam that every work of art is a message in a bottle. Whoever finds the bottle is the addressee, charged only to respond. Always concrete and personal, Linde’s responses were free of any system, forever open to improvised interpretation. The anthology ranges from essays on individual artists (continental leaders such as Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, and Francis Picabia, as well as Swedes who ought to be better known abroad) to idiosyncratic speculative texts (such as “The General and Unique in Art,” which quotes Mandelstam). It concludes with “Hodgepodge,” a compact but expansive and original exploration of the magic of drawing.
Linde was an erudite autodidact, at home in German, French, and English as well as Swedish, and in mathematics and philosophy as well as art history. He was a passionate advocate of the art that he loved, and he clung with equal tenacity to his blind spots: the entire medium of photography and the broad stream of art since the 1960s that has responded to our ubiquitous media culture, beginning with the work of Andy Warhol. Few in Sweden today remember Är allting konst? (Is everything art?), a compilation of earnest manifestos by Hultén, Linde, and twenty-seven others that appeared in 1963. But if the fierce disputes of Linde’s youth have faded, the originality, wit, and game-changing clarity of his best writings are as powerful as ever—and available now to readers of English around the world.
