Pretenzione Intenzione: Objects of Beauty and Bewilderment from the Archive of Harald Szeemann

In Pretenzione Intenzione: Objects of Beauty and Bewilderment from the Archive of Harald Szeemann, Marciano Art Foundation presents a collection of objects from the estate of the legendary Swiss art historian and exhibition maker Harald Szeemann (1933–2005). Szeemann was known for his innovative and generationally groundbreaking exhibition making practice which could be seen in projects such as the era-defining Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Forms at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 and documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, both of which championed the radical vision of artists experimenting outside the confines of traditional art historical categories and narratives. As part of his intellectual and curatorial practice, Szeemann was an obsessive collector of objects which became part of his larger intellectual library and archive. After his death his curatorial archive was bequeathed to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and, in part, to the Canton of Ticino in Switzerland. However, a number of Szeemann’s objects escaped the process of cataloguing and acquisition and were left behind in his studio workspace and archive known as Fabbrica Rosa (“Pink Factory”) in the Canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland. This mysterious group of objects (ranging from a black flag to a silver spoon encased in resin, a beaded crucifix and a Polaroid of the curator’s left eye) seemed to resist attempts to identify their origins or meanings. Escaping the general cataloguing of his archive, these strange and indecipherable objects were a small part of what Szeemann called his Museum of Obsessions, a collection of physical objects but also a mental landscape of artistic thoughts, philosophies, and concepts that manifested itself through Szeemann’s myriad exhibitions and projects (both realized and unrealized) as well as the spaces that he inhabited.

In 2015, Szeemann’s daughter, the artist Una Szeemann and a group of collaborators (Bohdan Stehlik, Michele Robecchi, Noah Stolz and Riccardo Lisi), turned these left-over and forgotten objects into an exhibition, Pretenzione Intenzione, presented first in the empty spaces of the Fabbrica Rosa after the archive had left the building. Last summer the exhibition was reinstalled in Szeemann’s beloved Monte Verità, the site of a historic meeting place for “life-reformers,” pacifists, artists, writers and supporters of various alternative movements in the first decades of the 20th century located only a few miles away from where he lived and worked near Locarno. The exhibition at Monte Verità was organized on the occasion of the launch of a book published under the same title in 2025 in which Una Szeemann and the books other editors (Bohdan Stehlik, Michele Robecchi and Elsa Himmer) invited a wide range of thinkers – a poet, an artist, art historians, an anthropologist, a playwright, a photographer and a critic – to embark on a series of archaeological daydreams as they considered these objects. Taking its title from a puzzling doodle found on a piece of paper in Szeemann’s archive, Pretenzione Intenzione (translated in English as “Pretension Intention”) suggests that an inquisitive openness lies at the heart of this collection of objects. An openness that invites storytelling and daydreams.

Following the Getty’s presentation of Szeemann’s archive in the exhibition Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions in 2018, MAF is excited to bring these sister objects to Los Angeles where they will live in the Library at MAF for a while, inviting further discussions about why we all, in different ways and on different scales, collect objects and ideas. Artists, writers, performers, architects and exhibition makers will be invited to engage with this collection of relics, weaving their own daydreams and stories from their alluring forms.