Харальд Зееманн: Куратор, художник, историк искусства.

Swiss artist, curator and art historian (1933–2005)
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 produced many one man shows. In 1958 he was married to Francoise Bonnefoy and in 1959 their son Jerome Patrice was born. Switzerland and died in 2005 at the age of 71 in the Ticino region. Despite being a somewhat "provincial institution" at the time Szeemann managed to open a new exhibition every month, often with young and promising artists. 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. and the Agentur für Geistige Gastarbeit ("Agency for Spiritual Migrant Work"). In 1972 he was the youngest artistic director at documenta 5 in Kassel. 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. For the 1980 Venice Biennale, he and Achille Bonito Oliva co created the "Aperto", a new section in the Biennale for young artists. 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. Until 2014, he was the only curator who had this distinction, which since the 2015 Venice Biennale is now shared with Okwui Enwezor. 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.

Throughout Szeemann's life he had collected all documentation related to his work and life. The end result was his personal archive, consisting of books about art, artists, art theory, exhibitions, curation, and the like. It also included anything acting as correspondence: letters and messages which were traded with artists, curators, sponsors, and any other relevant stakeholder. H This archive also encompassed articles akin to formal records, documentation, or notation which had been collected during Szeemann's various endeavors. Anything of any bearing with his various professional projects and curatorial plans had been collected and documented and curated. Harald Szeemann died in 2005, leaving behind his vast collection to an unknown beneficiary, until, in June 2011, the Getty Research Institute publicized purchase of The Harald Szeemann Archive and Library, probably one of the most important research collections for Western and Modern and Contemporary Art. Szeemann had devoted himself to his archive and library and resultingly it contains thousands of documents related to his practice as an art historian, art critic and curator which continue to be studied today. At the time, it was the largest acquisition in the Getty Research Institute's history. This collection encompasses of over 1,000 boxes of research. It consists of:
Correspondence with individual artists, such as those frequently exchanged such as: Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Christo and Jeanne Claude. The library portion consists of approximately 28,000 volumes. The archive also includes about 36,000 photographs and drawings as well as other materials Szeemann assembled through organizing and exhibition over 200 exhibitions. The collection is open to researchers and a published finding aid is available online: http://hdl. handle. net/10020/cifa2011m30

Szeemann invented the modern day Großausstellung ("great exhibition"), in which the artworks are tied to a central concept and are assembled into new and often surprising interrelationships. His over 200 exhibitions were distinguished by a great abundance of material and a broad range of themes. Important reference points were subversiveness, alternative lifestyles (for example Monte Verità), and the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total artwork", Wagner's concept of a work which spans all the arts, to which his own exhibitions were also indebted).