Ulf Linde, born 15 April 1929 in Stockholm. Art critic, writer, museum director, jazz musician. He was elected to the Swedish Academy on 10 February 1977 and admitted on 20 December 1977. Linde succeeded the writer Eyvind Johnson to Chair number 11. Many years as director of the Thielska Gallery in Stockholm. Awarded the Kellgren Prize in 1987, the Gerard Bonnier Prize in 1996 and the Pilot Prize in 1997.
On leaving upper-secondary school with his certificate, Linde performed as a jazz musician at the beginning of the 1950s, as a renowned vibraphone player with the emphasis on bebop. At Stockholm University College he studied first chemistry then ethnography, theoretical philosophy, the history of art and (privately under Karl Birger Blomdahl) composition. He wrote the film music for Mästerdetektiven och Rasmus (‘The master detective and Rasmus’) in 1953.
Yet it was not primarily music but art that was to represent his life’s path – although with jazz as a basis. As the listener relates to music like a lover, so the contemplator of art must invest himself in the work he is contemplating. This conviction was the condition for Linde to be able to elevate art criticism to an art in its own right. Everything depends on answering art’s own appeal. And on writing musically, at all costs.
Instead of taking a university degree Ulf Linde became an assistant at the Swedish Arts Council, the forerunner of Swedish Travelling Exhibitions. He started writing art criticism in 1952 and was employed by the national daily Dagens Nyheter from 1956 to 1968. In 1967 he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. Between 1968 and 1976 he held the new professorship in the theory of modern art at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. In 1977, the year he was elected to the Swedish Academy, he became director of the Thielska Gallery, a post he held for twenty years until his retirement in 1997.
Linde’s assiduous achievement in art criticism has resulted in surprisingly few large and authoritative works. Instead, there is an immensely large volume of scattered essays, short pieces and offprints, long rendering it almost impossible to form an overall picture of his writing as an art critic. This is no longer the case. Three voluminous works have recently seen the light. The first collected volume is the closely-printed 550-page Efter hand (1985; ‘As time goes by’), a standard work on Swedish art criticism during the latter half of the century, but also including many texts on architecture and literature. Then came a volume covering the period after 1985. This, too, was particularly productive, especially with texts from his pet Artes, the Academies’ joint journal which Linde, together with Östen Sjöstrand, made into a voice to be reckoned with. The volume was entitled Svar (1999; ‘Answers’) and the same year saw Presentationer (‘Presentations’), with Linde’s brief presentations of the artists whose work he had exhibited in the Thielska gallery. In Presentationer Linde’s unique style appears at its most distinct: with a few well-chosen words and some ingenious syntax Linde the microstylist brings to life the singularity of eighty artistic individualities.
In some ways the slim volume that laid the foundation of Ulf Linde’s reputation was also a collected work. It came out during the memorable year of 1960. With Spejare (‘Scouts’), Swedish art criticism gained in one go an analytical and insightful precision it had hitherto lacked. He collected a series of Dagens Nyheter articles on his favourites Picasso and Duchamp, and on “informal art” (Michaux, Dubuffet, Pollock et al.) with the starting point in a new view of the theory of art. This was presented in the same year in “Det ahlinska alternativet” (‘The Ahlinian alternative’), a now-classical essay in Bonniers Litterära Magasin on the writer Lars Ahlin: “Ahlin’s method appears today to offer a way out of a situation marked predominantly by two theories that are starting to rot and become unusable for a critic; not least a critic of pictures. One of them asserts that a work of art gains its value by functioning as an organism, that all its elements may be explained in terms of each other or from an underlying principle. The other considers that there is something in ‘nature’, ‘reality’ that requires a certain artistic form – if this is fulfilled, the work is thus ‘genuine’ and hence good.”
Ahlin’s alternative was according to Linde insight, but not “insight in the motive, the portrayed”, but insight into the medium of art – colour and form for pictures, text for literature”. This was ground for Linde’s assertion of “open aesthetics”. The work is at most a score, half-finished until performed. Only in the encounter with the individual contemplator of the work of art is the work completed.
Ulf Linde’s view of art is, in other words, perfectly suited to modernist, open art of the type of the Dadaists, the Cubists, Matisse or Duchamp, and he has written fundamental essays on practically all the classics of modernism. His continual work with his household god Duchamp culminated in 1986 in the weighty Marcel Duchamp. Important writings on Swedish artists include Lennart Rodhe (1962), Siri Derkert (1964) and Ragnar Sandberg (1979). In his work on Dawid, entitled Mot fotografiet (‘Against the photograph’), he eloquently explains his distaste for photographic art. During recent decades he has also worked backwards through the history of art, with important essays on Goya, Watteau and – above all – Piero della Francesca.
His stubbornly maintained modernist conviction has rendered him a target for art theoreticians of post-modern hue. He has however never hesitated before replying to a charge, and several of his debates with the opposing camp, e.g. with the staff of the journal Material, reprinted in Svar (‘Answers’), give an exemplary picture of a transition period in the history of aesthetics.
Ulf Linde’s interest in literature, prompted by the early Ahlin analyses, has resulted in fine readings – not least of Eyvind Johnson in Linde’s inaugural address in the Swedish Academy; of Östen Sjöstrand, Nelly Sachs, Mallarmé, Bengt Emil Johnson and André Breton – and in an exquisite volume of translations of Wallace Stevens verse, Om att bara finnas (1998; ‘On just being there’).
After a period of illness Ulf Linde returned to writing via Oscar Levertin (1862-1906), the most neglected writer of the nineties, whose literary criticism Linde published in the Swedish Academy classics series in 2007. The two volumes Kritiska prosa (Critical Prose) reveal Linde as an impressively sensitive reader of Levertin’s own kind. Levertin viewed criticism as “the tenth muse”, as a separate art form alongside the other nine. Ulf Linde brings out a peer and predecessor, indeed a friend.
The same view emerges also in Ulf Linde’s autobiography Från kart till fallfrukt – 70 korta kapitel om mitt liv et cetera (2008) (From Green Fruit to Windfalls). Here there is no critical distance between criticism and art, no attempt at objectivity: art for Linde is friendship, sociability and even love. So he has no problem in combining his different roles in cultural life, as a critic, a frequenter of museums, adult-educator, teacher, collector, curator. Från kart till fallfrukt is a good-natured, infinitely well-written and deeply engaging testament.
Jan Arnald
(Translated by Tim Crosfield)