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Stockholm (dpa) - Pontus Hulten, pioneering former head of the museum for modern art in the Swedish capital, has died aged 82, news reports said Friday.
Hulten, born in Stockholm, studied art history at Stockholm University and during the 1950s was curator at a small art gallery and also organized film screenings.
In 1960 he was named head of the Moderna Museet, a few years after it was created, and was credited with shaping the museum into a powerhouse of modern art.
"He understood what good art was way before others did, and was therefore way ahead of his times," author and art critic Carl-Johan Malmberg told the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper.
During his 13-year tenure numerous exhibitions were staged with works by early modern artists like van Gogh, modernists Klee, Magritte, Pollock and Kandinsky, and Swedish artists including Sven Erixson, Bror Hjorth and Sigrid Hjerten.
Theme exhibitions including "4 Americans" in 1962 with pop artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns grabbed headlines, as did solo exhibitions with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Edward Kienholz.
A one-time grant of 5 million kronor from the government in the early 1960s helped the museum expand its collection with works by Kirchner, Max Ernst, Miro, Dali, Mondrian and Picasso.
In 1974 Hulten left for Paris to head Centre Pompidou until 1981, and in the following years he also worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Palazzo Grassi in Venice and Museum Jean Tinguely in Basle, Switzerland.
An avid art collector, Hulten donated his private collection of 700 works to the Moderna Museet in November 2005.
Details of funeral arrangements were not immediately known.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
