Harald Szeemann

Harald Szeemann (11 June 1933 – 18 February 2005) was a Swiss curator, artist, and art historian. Having curated more than 200 exhibitions, many of which have been characterized as groundbreaking, Szeemann is said to have helped redefine the role of an art curator. It is believed that Szeemann elevated curating to a legitimate art form itself.

Personal life

Szeemann was born in Bern, Switzerland on June 11, 1933. He studied art history, archaeology and journalism in Bern and at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1953–60, and produced many one-man shows. In 1958 he was married to Francoise Bonnefoy and in 1959 their son Jerome Patrice was born.

Szeemann was hospitalized for pleural cancer in Locarno, Switzerland and died in 2005 at the age of 71 in the Ticino region. Despite being a somewhat "provincial institution" at the time Szeemann managed to open a new exhibition every month, often with young and promising artists. The Kunsthalle Bern is also where Szeemann mounted his "radical" landmark 1969 exhibition "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form" that included works by artists including Eva Hesse and Gary Kuehn, which caused such a reaction that it prompted his resignation as Kunsthalle director.

For decades Szeemann worked out of a studio, which he referred to as "Fabbrica Rosa" or "Pink Factory", in the Swiss village Maggia, where he conceived international exhibitions and experimented with traditional museological practices. and the Agentur für Geistige Gastarbeit ("Agency for Spiritual Migrant Work"). In 1972 he was the youngest artistic director at documenta 5 in Kassel. Artists of individual mythology are among others Armand Schulthess, Jürgen Brodwolf, Michael Buthe, James Lee Byars, the musician La Monte Young, Etienne Martin, Panamarenko, Paul Thek, Marian Zazeela, Horst Gläsker or Heather Sheehan.

For the 1980 Venice Biennale, he and Achille Bonito Oliva co-created the "Aperto", a new section in the Biennale for young artists. He was later selected as the Biennale director for both 1999 and 2001. This marked him as the first to curate both documenta and the Biennale. Until 2014, he was the only curator who had this distinction, which since the 2015 Venice Biennale is now shared with Okwui Enwezor.

From 1981 to 1991, Szeemann was a "permanent freelance curator" at the Kunsthaus Zürich. During this time, he also curated for other institutions including the Deichtorhallen Hamburg for its inaugural exhibition "Einleuchten: Will, Vorstel Und Simul In HH." In 1982 he commissioned a three-dimensional reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters's Hannover Merzbau (as photographed in 1933) for the exhibition "Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk" in Zürich the following year. It was built by the Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger and is now on permanent display in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.

Early exhibitions 1957

03.08 – 20.10 Kunstmuseum St. Gallen Malende Dichter – Dichtende Maler 24.09 – 27.09 Kleintheater Kramgasse 6, Bern Hugo Ball (1886–1927): Manusckripte, Photographien, Bücher (Bern – Zürich: 4.11.1957) Club Bel Etage, Zürich

1961

08.07 -03.09 Kunsthalle, Bern Otto Tschumi (Bern – Glarus) Kunsthaus, Glarus 02.09 – 24. 09 Städtische Galerie, Biel Buri, Gürtler, Iseli, Luginbühl, Meister, Spescha, Schaffner 09.09 -15.10 Kunsthalle, Bern Hans Aeschbacher: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen 21.10 – 26.11 Kunsthalle, Bern Prähistorisch Felsbilder der Sahara: Expedition Henri Lhote im Gebiet Tassili-n-Ajjer

1962

17.02-11.03 Kunsthalle, Bern Puppen-Marionetten-Schattenspiel: Asiatica und Experimente 17.03-23.04 Kunsthalle, Bern Charles Lapicque (Bern-München-Grenoble-Le Havre) Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, München/ Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble/Maison de la Culture, Le Havre 28.04-27.05 Kunsthalle, Bern Lenz Klotz, Friedrich Kuhn, Bruno Müller, Matias Spescha 02.06-01.07 Kunsthalle, Bern Walter Kurt Wiemken (Bern – St Gallen) Kunstmuseum St Gallen 07.07-02.09 Kunsthalle, Bern Francis Picabia (1879–1953): Werke von 1909 bis 1924 (Marseille-Bern) 4 Amerikaner: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Raushenberg, Richard Stankiewicz (Stockholm-Amsterdam-Bern) Moderna Museet, Stockholm/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 13.10-25.11 Städtische Galerie, Biel Harry Kramer: Automobile Skulpturen-Marionetten-Filme 20.10-25.11 Kunsthalle, Bern Kunst aus Tibet

1963

16.02-24.03 Kunsthalle, Bern Auguste Herbin (1882–1960) (Bern-Amsterdam) Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam 20.04-19.05 Städtische Galerie, Biel Englebert van Anderlecht, Bram Bogart (Bern-Bruxelles) Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles 04.05-03.06 Kunsthalle, Bern Alan Davie (Baden-Baden – Bern – Darmstadt – London – Amsterdam) Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden Piotr Kowalski 12.07-18.08 Kunsthalle, Bern William Scott (Bern-Belfast) Ulster Museum, Belfast Victor Pasmore 18.08-15.09 Städtische Galerie, Biel Heinz-Peter Kohler, Gregory Masurovsky 24.08-15.09 Kunsthalle, Bern Bildnerei der Geisteskranken-Art Brut- Insania pingens 21.09-27.10 Kunsthalle, Bern Louis Moillet 02.11-01.12 Kunsthalle, Bern Etienne-Martin (Bern-Amsterdam – Eindhoven) Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam/Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Major exhibitions Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969) Happening and Fluxus (1970) Documenta 5 (1972) Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk (1983)

Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form

Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form was a landmark show for Post-Minimalist American artists in 1969 at the Kunsthalle Bern.

Following the opening of the exhibition "12 Environments" in the summer of 1968, which featured the works of Andy Warhol, Martial Raysse, Soto, Jean Schnyder, Kowalski, and Christo, Harald Szeemann was asked to do a show of his own. Representatives of Philip Morris, American Tobacco Company, and Rudder and Finn, Public Relations Firm, visited Szemmann in Bern to recruit his expertise for a project. This project would entail substantial funding, with the additional benefit of collaborating with the Stedelijk (sponsored by the Holland American Line), and complete artistic freedom. The project was initially conceived whenever Szeemann, with the Director of the Stedelijk named de Wilde, traveled through Switzerland and Holland to select the works of younger artists for national shows. When visiting the studio of a Dutch painter, Reinier Lucassen, Szeemann was immediately impressed with the work of the painter's assistant Jan Dibbets. Jan greeted Szeemann from behind two tables; one of which had neon light coming out of the surface and the other one was covered in grass which he watered. Szeemann was thereafter inspired to focus the upcoming exhibition on behaviors and gestures. As well the exhibition committee, largely composed of local artists, decided they would dictate the programming and rejected shows proposed by Szeemann they had previously agreed to, including the solo show of Beuys. Thereafter Szeemann, tired of this open war, decided to resign and become a freelance curator and operated under his newly founded Agency for Spiritual Guest Work.

Szeemann's choices were eclectic but consistently focused on the subject of contemporary artists' personal mythologies. Large-scale sculptures by artists as: Bruce Nauman, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Chris Burden, Jessica Stockholder, Hanne Darboven, and Ute Schroder were viewed in relation to video installations by: Gary Hill, Mariko Mori, Zhang Peili, Paul McCarthy, and Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky. Cai Guo-Qiang was awrded the Leone d'Oro.

Paolo Baratta named directors for the different sections of film, architecture, theater, music, dance, and also visual arts, Szeemann's area of appointment. Szeemann was appointed the Visual Arts Director, succeeding his predecessor Jean Clair, with only five months to prepare for the 1999 Venice Biennale but with the expectation that he would also direct the following show in 2001.

Juries for art awards

2000: Contemporary Chinese Art Award

2002: The Walters Prize

2002: The Vincent Award

Memberships and boards

1961-2005: Collège de 'Pataphysique' (artist group)

1967-?: Founding member, International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT)

1996: Szeemann played a key role in shaping the architecture faculty at the Università della Svizzera italiana, the first university in Italian Switzerland, for the first six years after its founding.

1997-2005: Department of Visual Arts, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany

Awards received 1998: Award for Curatorial Excellence, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

2000: Max Beckmann Prize

2005: Das Glas der Vernunft

2005: Awarded a "Special Gold Lion" at the Biennale in Venice

Archive and library Throughout Szeemann's life he had collected all documentation related to his work and life. The end result was his personal archive, consisting of books about art, artists, art theory, exhibitions, curation, and the like. It also included anything acting as correspondence: letters and messages which were traded with artists, curators, sponsors, and any other relevant stakeholder. H This archive also encompassed articles akin to formal records, documentation, or notation which had been collected during Szeemann's various endeavors. Anything of any bearing with his various professional projects and curatorial plans had been collected and documented and curated.

Harald Szeemann died in 2005, leaving behind his vast collection to an unknown beneficiary, until, in June 2011, the Getty Research Institute publicized purchase of The Harald Szeemann Archive and Library, probably one of the most important research collections for Western and Modern and Contemporary Art. Szeemann had devoted himself to his archive and library and resultingly it contains thousands of documents related to his practice as an art historian, art critic and curator which continue to be studied today. At the time, it was the largest acquisition in the Getty Research Institute's history.

This collection encompasses of over 1,000 boxes of research. It consists of: Correspondence with individual artists, such as those frequently exchanged such as: Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The library portion consists of approximately 28,000 volumes. The archive also includes about 36,000 photographs and drawings as well as other materials Szeemann assembled through organizing and exhibition over 200 exhibitions.

Notability Szeemann invented the modern-day Großausstellung ("great exhibition"), in which the artworks are tied to a central concept and are assembled into new and often surprising interrelationships. His over 200 exhibitions were distinguished by a great abundance of material and a broad range of themes. Important reference points were subversiveness, alternative lifestyles (for example Monte Verità), and the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total artwork", Wagner's concept of a work which spans all the arts, to which his own exhibitions were also indebted).