Pontus Hulten gets to Venice after many years from his hometown Stockholm, and he comes with the new role of collector. One hundred and fifty works, chosen from a collection counting more than four hundred, will be visible in an exhibition curated by Stefano Cecchetto at Palazzo Franchetti in the Istituto Veneto for Sciences, Arts and Humanities, from 5 March to 9 July. They are works representing many encounters and intense and longlasting friendships with those who changed the art scene of the twentieth century: Sam Francis, Warhol, Ernst, Brancusi, Malevic, Duchamp, Oldenburg, Tinguely, just to mention some of them. Pontus left Venice in 1993, after starting with extraordinary success the season of big exhibitions in Palazzo Grassi. One in particular, "Futurismo e futurismi" has literally changed the political attitude kept until then towards the militants of that movement: "we must think that the Futurists were labeled as fascists before having considered the movement in its complexity" he tells thoughtfully. When he is asked of his intense Venetian adventure, he recalls the tours in the Lagoon, with his boat called with the strange name “Idle times”, the steady association with his artist friends Emilio Vedova and Santomaso, and from his thick white beard comes out an irresistibly sweet smile. Pontus Hulten has always lived in cities of water: Stockholm, where he was director of the Modern Museet before moving to the lagoon, Los Angeles, at the Museum of Contemporary Art: "it was a coincidence, and everywhere I went there was a boat waiting to take me around. In Venice I was lucky enough to live magic moments moving around in the lagoon, and I went up to the Istrian coasts and back" and yet that magic smile opens on the sharp Scandinavian cheekbones, lighting his extremely blue eyes. He likes to underline the Nordic origins of Venice, the first vestiges found on the island of Torcello. It is clearly not a coincidence that he decided to make visible in Venice part of his private collection, a collection coinciding with his private life, with the gifts by many friends. Thanks to his friend Clarenza Catullo, his assistant during the years of Palazzo Grassi, he managed to come back to the city together with his works. The exhibition aims to telling mostly a tale of friendships and happy encounters, all very personal and truthful. It is divided into three sections, embracing different themes.

The first section, "friends of Hulten" is a route which takes in fifty years of personal associations and tries to reveal through the works of art the hidden and private dimension of a real and fertile exchange between critic and artist; paintings, installations, pictures of friends such as Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jasper Johns, Jean Tinguely (the more affectionate of friends), Rebecca Horn. The second section concerns Hulten at the mirror (par lui meme) and it is a gallery of special portraits where the art historian is the protagonist portrayed from many different points of view. The third section, perhaps the most intimate and hidden, is a small gallery of drawings and works on paper that the Swedish art historian collected privately. There we find Malevic, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Constantin Brancusi, EmilioVedova, Daniel Buren. " The Road of Pontus” is a photographic journey through the long and contagious artistic and emotional route of this extraordinary character.