Ulf Linde

Ulf Harald Linde was a Swedish art critic, writer, jazz musician, museum director and a member of the Swedish Academy.

Biography

Linde was born in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. Interested in jazz music from a young age, he started playing the trumpet in the late 1940s, but soon switched to vibraphone. Between 1948 and 1952 he played in the groups of Thore Jederby and Simon Brehm, and recorded together with musicians such as Arne Domnérus, Bengt Hallberg, and James Moody, as well as with groups led by himself.
After his musical career ended, Linde worked as an art critic for Dagens Nyheter between 1956 and 1968, then as a professor at the Royal Institute of Art until 1975, as chief curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm from 1973 to 1976, and as director of the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm from 1977 to 1997. A prominent critic, his 1960 book Spejare had a large influence on the view of art in Sweden in the 1960s, and is mentioned as having "delivered an incendiary starting-point for an open concept of art based on the viewer’s active participation." Linde wrote over 30 books during his career, among them several monographs on artists and poets such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Siri Derkert and Wallace Stevens. In 1961 and 1963, he produced a number of replicas of Marcel Duchamp's readymades for exhibitions at Moderna Museet; the replicas, which were signed by Duchamp, would later be used for a number of exhibitions around the world.
Linde was a member of the Royal [Swedish Academy of Fine Arts] from 1963. He was elected a member of the Swedish Academy on 10 February 1977 and admitted on 20 December 1977, succeeding the writer Eyvind Johnson to seat 11.

Discography

''Jazz: 1948-1952''