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.

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 in 1956 to 1958 he began working as an actor, stage designer and painter, and produced many one-man shows.

Szeemann began organizing exhibitions in Switzerland in 1957, and in 1961 he was appointed as director of the Kunsthalle Bern at the age of 28.

Despite being a somewhat "provincial institution" at the time Szeemann managed to open a new exhibition every month, often with young and promising artists.

1957

In 1958 he was married to Francoise Bonnefoy and in 1959 their son Jerome Patrice was born.

1961

1962

There he organised an exhibition of works by the "mentally ill" from the collection of the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn in 1963, and in 1968 gave Christo and Jeanne-Claude their first opportunity to wrap an entire building: the Kunsthalle itself.

1963

In 1964 his daughter Valerie Claude was born.

He was twice married, the second time to artist Ingeborg Lüscher.

Their daughter is Una Szeemann.

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.

This was an entirely new opportunity for Szeemann therefore he accepted the sponsored proposal.

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.

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.

After leaving the Kunsthalle he founded the "Museum of Obsessions" and the Agentur für Geistige Gastarbeit ("Agency for Spiritual Migrant Work").

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

In 1972 he was the youngest artistic director at documenta 5 in Kassel.

He revolutionised the concept: conceived as a hundred-day event, he invited the artists to present not only paintings and sculptures, but also performances and "happenings" as well as photography.

The show had various sections named "Artist's Museum" or "Individual Mythologies".

For the 1980 Venice Biennale, he and Achille Bonito Oliva co-created the "Aperto", a new section in the Biennale for young artists.

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.

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.

In an interview in June 2001, he explained: "All the former Documentas followed the old-hat, thesis/antithesis dialectic: Constructivism/Surrealism, Pop/Minimalism, Realism/Concept. That's why I invented the term, 'individual mythologies'—not a style, but a human right. An artist could be a geometric painter or a gestural artist; each can live his or her own mythology. Style is no longer the important issue."

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.

Szeemann was hospitalized for pleural cancer in Locarno, Switzerland and died in 2005 at the age of 71 in the Ticino region.

Until 2014, he was the only curator who had this distinction, which since the 2015 Venice Biennale is now shared with Okwui Enwezor.