Ulf Linde's Message in a Bottle

Abstract

By ERIC SELLIN Lars Gyllensten has described the membership of the Swedish Academy as follows: "About half of the members are themselves writers of polite literature. The others are persons from Swedish cultural life and the humanities, with literary leanings and expert knowledge of the Academy's various spheres of responsibility. "x In fact, at present exactly half the membership consists of people whose principal achievements may be classified as literary. Of the remaining members, possessing what Gyllensten terms "literary leanings, " some lean farther than others. One member who qualified for his election to the Academy as an art critic and historian of ideas may also be considered as a belletrist and is haunted by the same profound esthetic questions which haunt the other writers. Ulf Linde was inducted into the Swedish Academy on 20 December 1977. He took Chair Eleven, which had previously been occupied by Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson and, before that, by seven other Academicians, including another Nobel laureate, Erik Axel Karlfeldt. Linde expressed bewilderment at being chosen for membership in the Academy.2 Indeed, Linde's election came as a surprise to many, for Linde has been anything but prolific. Furthermore, if we consider the straitlaced criteria which tend to govern academies anywhere and the somewhat oldfashioned, "polite " evaluative approach demonstrated for many years (until the 1960s at least) in administering the "idealistic " proviso in Alfred Nobel's 1895 will, then Ulf Linde does indeed appear highly anomalous. He is, certainly, the most unusual Academician. Ulf Linde was born in Stockholm on 15 April 1929 to Harald and Karin (nee Krouthen) Linde. He passed his Studentexamen in 1947. Linde's path to the Academic present was highly unorthodox. He never completed the formal university track because his other activities did not give him time to attend lectures. He started out as a jazz musician. In the late 1940s he played trumpet and vibes at Nalen a Stockholm dance hall where many good bands appeared and was a member of Simon Brehm's prestigious band. Linde is reputed to have been Sweden's leading jazz vibraphonist.3 His great, reputedly encyclopedic knowledge of art and literature led Linde to work in a number of quasiacademic contexts. From 1951 to 1956 he held an appointment as konstbildare or "art educator " in the Riksforbundet for Bildande Konst (National Association for Fine Arts). In 1955 he joined Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm's largest daily, where he remained for a decade as art and culture columnist. From 1968 to 1976 Linde gave courses at the Konstakademi in Stockholm as a professor of the theory of modern art and the history of ideas. In 1974 he became curator at the Moderna Museet, and since 1977 he has been the curator and secretary of the Thielska Galleriet on Stockholm's Djurgarden. In 1966 Linde was elected to the Akademi for de Fria Konsterna and in 1977 was made a member of the select "Eighteen" of the Svenska Akademien. The period during which Linde did much of his philosophical soul-searching and laid the brilliant groundwork for all his writing was one of generalized artistic and intellectual ferment: the sixties. Those curious and disruptive years saw a major upheaval in values in Sweden, as elsewhere, and if some institutions like the prestigious journal Ord och Bild (Word and Image) broke instead of bending and became casualties of the new intellectuals' will to shock, there were many exciting, positive events going on. It was a period during which Pontus Hulten (who later went to Paris and then to Los Angeles), Karin Bergqvist Lindgren and Carlo Derkert spared no expense nor effort to make the Moderna Museet one of the most interesting and controversial museums in the world.4 Linde was intimately involved in this enterprise. During those years Linde acquired a great deal of prestige and influence as a result of his brilliant mind, his keen judgments and his position of power as the art critic of a great daily newspaper. An idea of his reputation is conveyed by Daniel Hjorth, who writes: