Reassembling Warhol – a tale of the 60s

Olle Granath is the former Permanent Secretary of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and previously Director of the Nationalmuseum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

The Pop Art movement that culminated in the 1960s – building on ironic use of mass cultural icons, advertising images and stylistic repetition – is perhaps best known through its English and American practitioners. The Moderna Museet in Stockholm actively captured this international movement through exhibitions it arranged in the 1960s. The first in 1962 featured American artists, another in 1964 featured pop art and included the works of Andy Warhol. The year 1966 marked the first retrospective for Swedish-American Claus Oldenburg – Mr. Soft Sculpture – who was born in Stockholm. 


Hans Enocson, GE, Chairman AmCham Sweden, Olle Granath and
Magnus Sjöqvist, Magnistor AB, vice Chairman AmCham Sweden



And then came the Warhol retrospective in February 1968.

The show was to be marked by very particular ideas about repetition. Warhol’s many visual icons were to be included – Marilyn, Brillo boxes, flowers, cows and electric chairs – and there was to be an emphasis on juxtaposing still images with moving images to suggest their equivalence.

According to Granath, the Moderna was very poor then, with no princely sums budgeted for exhibitions.  The show would call for careful planning and execution during a very short preparatory period.

Warhol’s glowing cow images were mass-produced on wallpaper and then papered over the external walls of the museum. Given that it was winter and the trees were bare, these glowing cows on the hill on Skeppsholmen could be seen all the way from Slussen. One snowy winter day, Pontus Hultén – then director of the Moderna – arranged for his brother-in-law Gösta Wibom to bring in some real cows and tether them near the wallpaper cows. Master photographer Lennart Nilsson captured the encounter, and these images became a part of the Warhol universe.

Creation by improvisation was a hallmark of the show. Films that should have arrived never did, apparently because of copyright problems, so the Swedish Film Institute came to the rescue with material appropriate for film loops. Reproducing Brillo boxes turned out to be too expensive, so they ordered some flat cartons directly from the manufacturer and then spent hours folding them for the exhibit.


Mingle at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts

And a book needed to be produced for the exhibition, based on quotations.

“Pontus came by one day with a box full of newspaper clippings and said that here was everything that has been written by and about Andy Warhol,” Granath recalled. “He gave me the job of reading through all this material and drafting a manuscript with Swedish translations. After several nights of reading and note-taking I sent him my compilation.”

“Excellent,” said Pontus over the phone, “but there’s a quotation missing.”
"Which one?”
“In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”
“If I had seen it, I would have included it.”
Silence at the other end.
“Well if he hasn’t said it, he surely could have said it, so let’s include it.”
And so the most famous Warhol quotation was a fact.

Today the walls plastered with Marilyn images look much the same as they did in 1968. Warhol has left his mark.

“Ironically, Warhol is more positively remembered now than he was received in 1968,” Granath stated.  “In the spring of 1968 there were mixed reactions to American-based pop art and its perceived consumerism focus, guided by the Marxist fervor of the day. So the same people who were enthusiastic about Warhol when he appeared in the 1964 pop exhibit turned against him in 1968.

“A good artist sees into the future,” Granath concluded. “He imagines what things will be like. Warhol himself claimed that there was nothing behind the surface, and what he said is valid and sustainable about how things are. A charismatic an enigmatic figure in our time, he will be remembered. “

Written exclusively for AmCham Sweden by Robbin Battison, Battison & Partners AB
Photos by Alexander Farnsworth


Hans Enocson thanked Gunnar Hesse, Gunnar Hesse AB, for the
12 year contribution to the AmCham board of directors


Peter Kopelman, Fujitsu, leave the AmCham board of directors






Aimee Fay and Berit Salheim - AmCham Sweden -
wishes you a wonderful summer!