Historical Judgement 02

Historical Judgement 16

Eckhart J. Gillen

Art as Consonance with Universal Harmony 19

Aya Soika

Emil Nolde in the Federal German Chancellery documenta.

History/Art /Politics

02

Raphael Gross

To Our Readers 03

Wolfgang Brauneis

The ‘Divinely Gifted’ in the Federal German Republic

Lars Bang Larsen and Dorothee Wierling

Introduction 04 Maria Eichhorn in conversation with

23

Lars Bang Larsen

25

Sabine Eckmann

In the Shadow of the Cold War

28 Pietro Rigolo The Rose Valland Institute at documenta 14 Seeing Better through documenta?

07 Julia Friedrich

Modern Art is the Best Medicine

12

Bernhard Fulda

documenta 1: A New Start Through Canonisation?

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31

Walter Grasskamp

Exhibition Photographs as a Time Machine

34

Farid Rakun in conversation with Julia Voss

Looking Ahead to documenta 15

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To Our Readers

To Our Readers

Raphael Gross

The goal of this magazine is to support and facilitate a public forum for presenting and discussing judgements on historical and ethical questions.

This year’s issue focuses mainly on the topic documenta. history/art/politics. We look ahead to two exhibitions that are now in the early stages of prepa­ ration at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. The first examines the political history of the important con­temporary art exhibition, the documenta, which was presented as a counter project to the Nazi show Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). In fact, the documenta itself was not entirely free of intellectual continuities relating to the Nazi era.

Parallel to this, the second exhibition focuses on an almost unknown topic: the privileged group of artists known as the ‘divinely gifted’. Nominated by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels and classified as ‘indispensable’ during the Nazi period because of their importance for the regime, they were exempted from military service at the front. But their success also continued later in the Federal Republic of Germany, where they received professorships, awards and commissions, often for the shaping of public space.

What difference does it make when we discover that Werner Haftmann, the spiritus rector of the early documenta shows, had been a Nazi Party member? What does it mean when sculptors who were responsible for designing the Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg, or the seaside resort in Prora built for the Nazi ‘Strength Through Joy’ movement, were commissioned in the 1950s and 1960s to create memorials to the victims of the Nazis? The articles in the present magazine explore

these questions. They open new perspectives on the documenta and the postwar period, contradicting the claim of an aesthetic new start after 1945. And they highlight the importance of not letting wishes, fantasies and clichés distort our gaze, but being guided instead by facts, critical scrutiny, and discussions.

Perhaps this will allow us to look beyond en­ trenched ways of seeing so as to discover and illuminate the blind spots. It will also point up what is missing.

Take the first documenta, for example: instead of presenting art by Emil Nolde, who was only allegedly persecuted by the Nazis, it could have shown works by important Jewish artists such as Otto Freundlich and Jankel Adler, or Felix Nussbaum, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.

I hope you find much of interest in this issue.

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Introduction

Particularly from an international perspective, con­ temporary artistic positions of artists like Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Sigmar Polke and others seem to have greatly influenced postwar Germany. Using the example of the documenta, which is held every five years, we aim to look at this aesthetic history in its political context in an exhibition due to open in 2021 at the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

The first documenta opened in the summer of 1955 in Museum Fridericianum in Kassel—timed to coincide with the popular Federal Garden Show that took place in nearby Auepark. In a provincial West German city on the border to the Soviet-occupied zone, the documenta, with its extensive presentation of im­ portant painters and sculptors of Western modern art, was a success right away. In the following years the ‘Museum of 100 Days’ envisaged by its founder, Arnold Bode, became a leading event among the world’s art biennials. Since then the documenta has been formative in curating, communicating and theorising modern and contemporary art. It has had a canonising effect on artists and entire art movements and has meanwhile become a canonised institution itself.

But the documenta is historically important beyond its role as an international art event. While steeped in events of contemporary history, art history, and exhibi­ tion history, it is simultaneously a German institution that paradigmatically demonstrates that art neither conceptually nor practically arises independently of its cultural surroundings. With this in mind, our aim is to explore the historical conditions that gave rise to the documenta in the long postwar era. On the one hand it

was defined by the attempt to dissociate from National Socialism and its anti-modernist art policy, while at the same time there was no open critical debate on the matter. On the other hand it illustrates the process of cultural Westernisation, which involved fencing off from the state socialist bloc and its art policies.

The artistic director of documenta 12, Roger M. Buergel, characterised the exhibition as a “civilising act”. The documenta’s role in the postwar cultural re­ habilitation has become one of the founding myths of the Federal Republic of Germany—a myth that is open to discussion. The following contributions focus on the critical historical analysis of the early documenta shows, setting a benchmark for this exploration.

Introduction

Lars Bang Larsen and Dorothee Wierling

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The Rose Valland Institute at documenta 14

on national loan in the museum’s collection. Could you tell me a bit more about the institute?

The institute is named after art historian Rose Valland, who secretly recorded details of Nazi looting during the German occupation of Paris. After the war, she played a leading role in efforts to have looted art restituted to its rightful owners. The establishment of the institute was announced to the public in March 2017, three months before the documenta opening, with a call for papers focusing on the topic of Orphaned Property in Europe.1 This led to a work­ shop—conducted by the historians and prove­ nance researchers Małgorzata A. Quinkenstein and Nathalie Neumann—that was held at the University of Kassel toward the end of the exhibition in September. Among the scholars who took part were Dina Gold from Washington D. C., author of the book: Stolen Legacy—Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice at Krausenstrasse 17/18, Berlin, Daniel McClean, an art and cultural property lawyer from Los Angeles, who dedicates a large part of his practice to art recovery, including the restitution of Nazi-looted art to Jewish families, and Raffaella Frascarelli, founder of the Nomas Foundation in Rome. Her paper was titled Books are made for use, not to be hidden away. The Case of the Hebrew Library of Rome. The day before the workshop, the conference The Apartments of Jewish Tenants as Witnesses of the Holocaust: The Paris Case was held at the Museum Fridericianum, with Sarah Gensburger, a sociologist of memory, and her colleagues Isabelle Backouche and Eric Le Bourhis.2 The Rose Valland Institute continued its activities with an open call for contributions on the issue of Unlawful Ownership in Germany: The public was invited to research Nazi looting of inherited property, and the institute offered to support such research. We’ve been contacted by people who own stolen property, people who were expropriated by the Germans and were now trying to determine where their stolen property had gone, and people who got something back.

Maria Eichhorn

The Rose Valland Institute at documenta 14

Maria Eichhorn in conversation with Lars Bang Larsen

Artist Maria Eichhorn founded the Rose Valland Institute as her contribution to documenta 14. The project examines how the Nazis took control of property and businesses, focusing particularly on the seizure and looting of Jewish property. On a wider level this discussion concerns the documenta’s potential for expanding beyond its original mandate of championing ‘the most important contemporary art’ by including artistic research into historical events. Lars Bang Larsen, who is currently preparing an exhibition on the political history of the documenta at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, met with Maria Eichhorn to talk about the Rose Valland Institute.

Lars Bang Larsen Using a metaphor from hard science I would describe your practice as a kind of quantum physics of social reality: an art that analyses deep structures of the empirical world and institutional domains, and makes apparent entanglements between historic events and processes where power hides, or that we otherwise tend to think of as separate and normal. At times, your work takes the form of historic research, for example in your contribution to docu­ menta 14: a project titled the Rose Valland Institute. With its research on looting, provenance, and policies of restitution, the Rose Valland Institute also relates to your earlier projects such as In den Zelten … from 2015, in which you dealt with the history of ownership of the plot of land where Haus der Kulturen der Welt is located; and your 2003 exhibition Politics of Restitution at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, for which you hired a historian to investigate the provenance of fifteen works

Lars Bang Larsen People

could make appointments during the exhibition period of documenta 14 and interviews were conducted at the Rose Valland Institute office at the Neue Galerie; the interviews were not public, but could you tell me about some of them?

Su Goldfish, an artist and filmmaker from Sydney, told us the story of two milk jugs. A woman in Hamburg bought them at a flea market Maria Eichhorn

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successfully filed for restitution of a painting by Max Liebermann from the Gurlitt estate …

and researched the inscription on the jugs: “E. GOLDFISCH, EMS”. Su Goldfish had com­ pleted a film about looking for her family in 2017, called The Last Goldfish, that back then had just screened at the Sydney Film Festival. Because of the film the woman from Hamburg found her and sent her the jugs. Su Goldfish told us that they had belonged to the hotel of her grandparents, which they were forced to sell back to the bank once the racist laws imposed on Jewish businesses destroyed their business. Another woman who contacted us received two vases from her father: he took them from the house of his Jewish neighbours in a small town near Kassel during the Pogromnacht. Another object we were told about is a piano in which the name ‘Siegfried Alkan’ (1858–1941) was engraved.

The Jewish composer Alkan lived in Dillingen in the Saar region until 1938. He was a distant relative of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

During the Pogromnacht on 9 November 1938, his house was looted and much of its inventory was destroyed. The mother of the man who contacted us had bought the piano from someone in Saar­ louis in 1982. Besides Alkan’s engraved name, there are other references to its origin on it. Neither the building that the composer Alkan owned nor the building from which the vases were stolen were returned to their rightful owners, nor was the Löwenstein Hotel in Bad Ems given back to the Goldfish family.

Lars Bang Larsen …

the famous case of the Hitler-appointed collector and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, who built a big art collection for the planned Führermuseum in Linz, where Hitler intended to display looted art. After the war, Gurlitt passed on his criminal collection of some 1,500 masterpieces to his son, which were discovered in his Munich apartment in 2012. Its value was estimated at 1bn €.

Toren had been researching his family’s property history since 2011. When the Gurlitt estate was discovered, Max Liebermann’s painting Zwei Reiter am Strand (1901) was among the paintings that turned up.5 In 2014, Toren sued the Federal Republic of Germany, demanding that the authorities track down the paintings that the Gestapo had confiscated from the estate of his great-uncle David Friedmann in Breslau, or pay compensation. The confiscation list and other documents that I showed are valuable sources for further research on the David Friedmann Col­lec­ tion. Another part of the exhibition was an album with 85 photographs from the Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz that documents the confiscations by the Germans in Paris (1940–44).

Sarah Gensburger’s book Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews. A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940–1944, published in 2015, is based on this album. I invited her not only to the conference mentioned above, but also to cooperate on this part of the pre­sen­ta­ tion. Photographs displayed next to the historic photographs in her book show the locations as they appear today. The historic photographs document the Nazi looting in Paris. Hundreds of crates full of toys, furniture, pianos, etc. were shipped to Germany. The booty was auctioned off and distributed among the civilian population.

Auction records 1935–42, Berlin, a 12-hour film with historical documents from the Landesarchiv Berlin, was screened in the exhibition. The film shows auction files with lists of the auctioned objects and the names of the buyers. The archivist Martin Luchterhandt from the Landesarchiv wrote the note on the historical and present-day relevance of these documents. And finally there was a thematic library which is now in the Rose Valland Institute’s office at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg at the University of Bonn.

What did you end up displaying at the Neue Galerie in Kassel?

Lars Bang Larsen

Maria Eichhorn The presentation consisted of several parts, each with wall texts by scholars I had invited to contribute. Under the title Unlawfully acquired books from Jewish ownership, I presented looted books from the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek (Central and Municipal Library) in Berlin. The librarian and provenance researcher Sebastian Finsterwalder put the books on the shelf and wrote the accompanying notes. Two books were highlighted here in particular; one of them was The Poetical Works of Wordsworth from the library of Gertrude Hirschweh. Her grandson contacted us in November 2017. We put him in contact with the librarian and the book was restituted in December 2017.3 Two additional sections of the presentation in Kassel presented case studies on looted art collections. One of them was The David Friedmann Collection, Breslau. For this, I inter­viewed one of the heirs of the art collector David Friedmann, David Toren. 4 He became known in 2015, when he

The Rose Valland Institute at documenta 14

Maria Eichhorn

Lars Bang Larsen Can

you tell me a bit about the dialogue that you had with documenta 14 artistic director Adam

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Scymczyk about the making of the Rose Valland Institute and the subject of the Holocaust? And also, why the documenta? What does the documenta represent as an institution that made it relevant for you to launch the institute here?

or Seurat’s Les Poseuses (Small Version), 1888–1975.” He writes that what distinguishes your project from Haacke’s … “is that Eichhorn has moved from the tracing of painterly masterpieces [as Haacke did] to analysing the largely ephemeral accumulations of vernacular books, whose actual current monetary value is in fact mostly negligible. But it is precisely this shift from stolen masterpieces to the relative banality of the stolen books that endows Eichhorn’s astonishingly detailed and precise research with all the more impact and insight, succinctly defining what the work of mnemonic agency initiated by cultural practices can actually achieve.”8

I’m sure you know that Adam Szymczyk wanted to show the Gurlitt estate at documenta 14. He knew my works Politics of Restitution and In den Zelten … and invited me as, you might say, an artistic expert on looted art, to work together on the idea and its implementation and the presentation of the Gurlitt estate at documenta 14. We met several times, also with his co-curators, mulling and discussing ideas for how to present the collection in the context of documenta and, perhaps more importantly, what that would mean. But in the end, it proved im­ possible to show the estate. There is an interview with Adam Szymczyk, Hans Haacke, Alex Alberro, and myself about it.6 In the meantime, I also worked on my own piece, which was based on my earlier works and took shape in the exchange of ideas, in conversations with people who were involved in it. There were several works on view at documenta 14 that grappled with the issue, the majority of which were shown at the Neue Galerie. A documenta with its international renown is an opportunity to share such issues with wide audiences. Among others, Catherine David’s documenta X, in which Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge played a central part, is a good example of this.

The Rose Valland Institute at documenta 14

Maria Eichhorn

I’ve seen every documenta since 1982, and process-oriented, open-ended/ongoing or performative works were always among the ones that I thought were especially interesting. Like Tanya Bruguera’s performance at Documenta11 and works in public settings like Hans Haacke’s We (all) are the people at the last documenta, the films of Geta Brătescu and Amar Kanwar. Other examples are the works of Adrian Piper — con­sid­ er, for example, her Probable Trust Registry—, the work of Banu Cennetoğlu and the performances of Yael David.

Maria Eichhorn

Finally, what is the future of the Rose Valland Institute?

Lars Bang Larsen

We’ve had an office at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg at the University of Bonn since October 2018. The institute and the university have received funding from the German Lost Art Foundation to research the provenance of the piano and the vases and we have hired a provenance researcher to do that. In this context the ownership conditions of the three afore­ mentioned buildings will also be researched.

Moreover, multiple traces underline the urgent need for research into the David Friedmann collection. The inventory and other documents that have been researched up to now in archives in Poland and Germany represent a valid body of source material for further investigation of the collection. In the first place this concerns identification of the individual works and the reconstruction of the collection as a whole. From there we want to research into where the works are located today. It is necessary to clarify the different places the works passed through up to their present location. I have done a second interview with David Toren about the present state of research. The Rose Valland Institute can

Maria Eichhorn

Lars Bang Larsen The Rose Valland Institute is an exceptional art project because it is a proposal for an institutional entity. It is also an atypical piece of institutional critique, in that it not only critiques and analyses but also institutes, or self-institutes. In documenta history, institutional critique is of course represented by Hans Haacke and works that he has contributed to several documentas. In your catalogue essay for Haacke’s retrospective at the New Museum in New York you write about his work on provenance research, Seurat’s Les Poseuses (Small Version), 1888–1975, and you state that “training a critical eye on the constellations of transactions and ownership that Haacke [uncovers], we can extend his work into the present—and the future.”7 This statement could be applied to the Rose Valland Institute, too, and its tracing of constellations of transactions and ownership in Nazi era Germany and Europe. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh compares the Rose Valland Institute to “the provenance research that Haacke initiated … in works such as Manet-PROJEKT ’74,

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Modern Art is the Best Medicine

move elsewhere, and other universities and departments can also launch their own initiatives to do the kind of work that is the Rose Valland Institute’s mission—sociology, legal studies, political science etc.—in order to embed the questions, the research, and the studies in a broader historical and political perspective.9

How the documenta helped the West Germans to present the wounds they had inflicted on others as their own—and at the same time to heal them.

Julia Friedrich

1

documenta 14. Rose Valland Institute Call for Papers: Orphaned Property in Europe.

Online at: www.documenta14. de/en/news/16099/rosevalland-institut (accessed 12.12.2019)

2 documenta 14, Calendar: The Apartments of Jewish Tenants as Witnesses to the Holocaust: The Paris Case.

Online at: www.documenta14. de/en/calendar/24959/theapartments-of-jewishtenants-as-witnesses-tothe-holocaust-the-pariscase (accessed 12.12.2019).

3 Rose Valland Institute: Unlawfully Acquired Books from Jewish Ownership.

Online at: www.rosevalland institut.org/books.html (accessed 13.12.2019).

4 Rose Valland Institute: “I dis­tin­guish between Germans old enough to have played a role in the war, and the post-war generation.”

Interview with David Toren (2016–17). Online at: www. rosevallandinstitut.org/ toren_en.html (accessed 12.12.2019).

5 The work is registered as item no. 160 in the confiscation list.

6 documenta 14: The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate: Adam Szymczyk in conver­ sation with Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn, and Hans Haacke. Online at: www. documenta14.de/en/south/

59_the_indelible_presence_ of_the_gurlitt_estate_ adam_szymczyk_in_ conversation_with_ alexander_alberro_maria_ eichhorn_and_hans_haacke (accessed 13.12.2019).

7 Eichhorn, Maria: “On Hans Haacke’s Seurat’s Les Poseuses (small version), 1888–1975”. In: Gary CarrionMurayari and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.): Hans Haacke: All Connected. New Museum, New York 2019, pp. 168-188, p. 168 f.

“On account of bad weather, coming to terms with the past took place in art.”

The rupture that National Socialism signified for Western history and the understanding of history can be felt in a particular way in the field of culture. Some of the most important postwar debates about this rupture are related to cultural questions. Among them were the dispute between Karl Jaspers and Ernst Robert Curtius about Goethe and the persisting Goethe cult.

And naturally, also from 1949, the debate about Theodor W. Adorno’s statement: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, which he extended and amended almost 20 years later: “All post-Auschwitz culture, including the urgent critiques of it, is garbage.”

When the rupture can be felt particularly deeply in the field of culture, it must be mended within this culture, and that, in my opinion, was a political-historical function of the first documenta. Kurt Tucholsky once said, “On account of bad weather, the German revolution took place in music”. In postwar West Germany, the difficult attempt to come to terms with the German past, known in German as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, occurred in art and culture. That is where patching and repairing could take place. In other fields there could be no hope of repairs, but reparation claims could be expected.

8 Buchloh, Benjamin: Rock Paper Scissors. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh on some means and ends of sculpture at Venice, Münster, and Documenta. artforum international 1 (2017), pp. 279-291, p. 289.

9 This was initiated by the sociologist and co-director of the Kolleg, Werner Gephart.

Since then Joshua Straube has joined the institute as a colleague, replacing Fanny Hauser and Krzysztof Kościuczuk from the documenta. Lucy Wasensteiner from the provenance research department of the Art-­ historical Institute heads the coordination between the Rose Valland Institute and the University. Maria Eichhorn would also like to thank the following people: Clemens Albrecht, Gianmaria Ajani, Stephan Berg, Anne-Marie Bonnet, Nina Dethloff, Maurizio Ferraris, Stefan Finger, Michael Hoch, Roland Kanz, Julia Krings, Volker Kronenberg, Birgit Ulrike Münch, Martin Przybilski, Ulrike Saß, Katja Spranz, Michael Stockhausen, Katja Terlau, Matthias Weller, Rein Wolfs, Christoph Zuschlag.

Modern Art is the Best Medicine

Note: This is a shortened version of the conversation between Lars Bang Larsen and Maria Eichhorn at the symposium documenta.

History/Art/Politics held at the Deutsches Historisches Museum on 15 October 2019.

Continuity Minimising the Rupture Repairing the rupture means asserting continuity. This is the main thrust of the catalogue introduction for the

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Modern Art is the Best Medicine

first documenta, written by Werner Haftmann, the exhibition’s head of art history. The goal was “to make international contact on a broad basis and to embark again on a long-interrupted conversation in our own house, as it were.”1 The subject of the rupture was broached, but masking over it required minimising it.

Germany, Haftmann wrote, had resigned from “the united endeavours of the modern European spirit” in “a rather strange fit of iconoclasm”.2 National Socialism— “on account of bad weather”, one is tempted to add— had taken place in art, in the form of iconoclasm. But only fitfully, and it was consequently unable to do much harm to art. The ostracised artist went “into the underground”—and this, too, downplayed the situation because the Nazis had, in fact, forced other people to go underground. Hence, Haftmann’s artist lived in quite an idyllic underground. He “painted in the laundry room … and fed himself like the lilies of the field”. In other words, following the biblical image, he remained under God’s care and protection. And evidently, along with him the whole of modernism, whose “continuity of thought”, “relentless progressive movement”, and “magnificent blazing perspectives” the Nazis could “not touch at all”.

Haftmann expanded the idea of this indestructible continuity of artistic development as far as possible.

It encompassed “everything achieved so far”, and “all European nations”. This is evidently about a European superculture, a rather eerie thought. It certainly offered something to the German public of 1955 but it was somewhat garish and overdone: a suspiciously loud call to art, Western civilisation, and modernism— maybe to drown out that there was not much going on with all that. The beautiful progress that had indeed opened up “magnificent blazing perspectives” had not stopped the Nazis, who had used it for their own purposes.

Consequently, art which marks a particular moment, which refers to social or political issues, did not fit this concept. So, as we know, the curators reconstructed only a segment of modernism. They showed nothing by George Grosz or Otto Freundlich and merely two rather harmless paintings by Otto Dix. Indeed, the documenta did not reconstruct modernism, it constructed its supposed continuity, and art that could not be fitted into this construction was left out. This applied to all art that could re-evoke a critique of the bourgeois order or could be a reminder of hopes for social change, which the Nazis had smashed. In fact, all art that could remind viewers that the rupture had occurred at all.

The Cosmeticised Corpse This reduction and smoothing over of modernism, the assertion of its lack of ruptures, can be traced back to the rupture itself. The grip of Nazism could still be felt by the curators down to their very bones, including the acts of conformism that had been required of them and that they had performed under the regime. They had to account to an audience and to art critics and art experts such as the likes of Hans Sedlmayr, whose criteria were close to those of the Nazis—although the Nazis them­ selves had not invented them. The politically explosive element, in Nazi terminology: the ‘corrosive’ quality of modernism, which the Nazis, not without reason, recognised in modern art, was excluded from the docu­ menta, perhaps for this very reason. In this re­spect the exhibition in Kassel was not really sharply counter­ posed to the Munich show Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). Adorno was probably right in saying in his 1950 essay Auferstehung der Kultur in Deutschland? (The Resurrection of Culture in Germany?) that modern art, particularly Expressionism, had lost its explosive power for the present. This power was tied to the possibility of revolution—Adorno phrased this more loftily as the “attainment of Utopia”.4 In Adorno’s description the resurrected, reanimated culture that had arisen after the disintegration of this hope looks like a cosmeticised corpse, a harmless, decrepit zombie. But the curators evidently deemed it necessary to plaster on the make-up so thickly that the zombie wouldn’t be too scary.

Deep-freezing History The maximal expansion of continuity shaped the artistic concept of the first documenta. This became obvious in a particularly striking way in the very first room. The first photo walls did not primarily show modern art, but rather artefacts from earlier epochs, which due to the presentation, the so-called “levelling effect of photography”3, lost their historically de­ter­ mined qualities. Here we can see that invoking the idea of universal history actually has the effect of making history with its mediations and ruptures disappear.

The art of the documenta was intended to be timeless, embedded in an overarching context of meaning beyond specific epochs. In other words, it was supposed to confirm exactly what modernism had already called into question.

Continuity as a Biographical Stopgap Leaving aside the art-political nation building of the postwar period, as well as the art-political manoeuvres in the Cold War that I only mention here in passing, we can also find very personal reasons for covering up ruptures and asserting continuity. The artist and writer Hans Platschek already referred to this in an essay in the 1970s, confronting the opening address for documenta III, in which Haftmann invoked a “freedom …

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downplaying it. What concerns me here is a question raised by Christian Fuhrmeister: “For whom did the interest in ‘modernism’ have an exonerating function, for whom did it become a temporary hideaway … and who could now actually realise … a commitment that had been deferred or sup­ pressed so far? Which ‘perpetrator’ was retrospectively allowed to attain the status of a ‘victim’ himself by virtue of his advocacy of innocent ‘modernism’?”9 It is a question that was asked late and has not begun to be answered. In any case, it is recognisable how this transfer from perpetrator to victim occurred.

The first documenta is instructive in this respect. It shows how modernism was harnessed and its purported innocence instrumentalised. Declaring oneself on the side of modernism meant not only asserting continuity and minimising the rupture—it also meant externalising what could not be minimised. Commitment to mod­ ernism signalled that one had had nothing to do with its enemies. If that was the case, one could show something of the damage they had caused. It was even quite helpful.

Discontinuity The Stylisation of the Rupture In fact, the rupture was not over and gone, it could be shown, and even exhibited. But only in such a way that two aspects stayed hidden: the dimension of the past events and the question of perpetrators and responsi­ bili­ty. A second strategy can thus be discerned alongside that of continuity: an exploitation of discontinuity, of rubble, of wounds, which certainly existed and which could be displayed. Rubble and wounds are impressive.

They compel the viewer into respectful silence—a silence that excludes a conversation about how the wounds occurred and who is responsible. Most of all, the showable rubble and wounds concealed the unimaginable that people had inflicted on others and for which no images exist, and cannot exist.

The first documenta’s aesthetic of ruins—and not just the first, incidentally—was understood as a kind of demonstrative modesty, as well as a device that made a virtue of necessity. This contains a grain of truth, if not intentionally. “Culture is in ruins,” Adorno declared, “but the bombed sites have been cleared away—where they remain, they look like respectable ruins.”10 The exhibition photos show both aspects. Everything looks neat and tidy, newly swept, as if the rubble had just been cleared away. But the devastated interior décor of the Fridericianum has not been reconstructed; instead, its absence has been stylised as the elegance of ruins.

The forlorn look of the large halls that had been created when the bombs blasted away the walls, the bare brickwork, the concrete ceilings—Bode seized on all

Modern Art is the Best Medicine

beyond national, political and social bonds”, with a magazine article by Haftmann from 1934.5 In the latter the young Haftmann recommended Expressionism to the Nazi leaders. Again he expressed himself in the vocabulary of the time, thus completely different from the manner of speaking he adopted after the war.

He argued that Expressionism was a “German type” of art and that what determined the “spirit” was “the portentous mission that is embedded in it by virtue of blood and living space.”6 In the current state of re­ search, which has been inadequate for decades, it is difficult to identify the predominant motives here.

Opportunism probably played a role, perhaps the impulse to defend modernism, and certainly the nationalistic conviction that the new state could, and should, connect up with the new art.

It is not difficult to find similar nationalistic acrobatics from other members of the documenta working committee. In 1936 Alfred Hentzen, later the director the Hamburger Kunsthalle, presented portraits of Adolf Hitler and other ‘Great Germans’ in the exhibition Grosse Deutsche in Bildnissen ihrer Zeit in the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. Hentzen joined the Nazi Party in 1940. Kurt Martin, the director of the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe from 1934 to 1956, held the post of Chief Commissioner of the Museums in Alsace directly following the German occupation of the region in 1940 and was involved in cases of Aryanisation.

Herbert von Buttlar, the documenta secretary, worked as an archaeologist during the Nazi period. He evidently had a nationalistic relapse in 1960 when, as secretary-general of the West Berlin Academy of Arts, he commented on the refusal of the poet Mascha Kaléko, a German-Jewish refugee from the Nazis, to accept the Fontane Prize because one of the jurors had been an SS member: “If the emigrants don’t like the way we do things here then they should stay away …

I am not a Jew but I have suffered at least as much as the Jews.”7 There is nothing detrimental to be found about Hans Mettel, a sculptor whose works were regarded as ‘degenerate’. The remaining committee member, documenta founder Arnold Bode, had been a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) since 1929.

In 1933 he was sacked from his lectureship at the Berlin Handicrafts Teachers’ Seminar. He described himself in notes as a “resistance fighter”, and reported from a trip to Paris in 1937: “Guernica at the World’s Fair: a signal for every resistance fighter!”8 It can be said of those luminaries of art history, Haftmann, Hentzen and Martin, that however they dealt with it subjectively, they were objectively involved in the rupture, in the failure of modernism, and that they had good personal reasons for minimising and

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this enthusiastically. He gushed about the “tempo­ rariness” as a “stimulus” and sought to entice Haftmann to Kassel with the prospect of a “colossal war ruin”.11 Exploiting the Rupture The works of Classical Modernism evolved their impact against this background, on these walls. I think it happened not only in the familiar way described by experts like Roger M. Buergel, in the sense of demo­ cratisation, of creating a public sphere through art which had an openness and incomprehensibility that compelled the public to engage in conversation.12 These works were not quite as open and incom­ prehensible; the exhibition labelled them with meaning, albeit the meaning of a mild dose of meaninglessness, a transcendental homelessness that could be savoured but whose causes should not be questioned.

The opening work of the exhibition, Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Kniende (Kneeling Woman), which had already met with hostility long before the Nazis, was the sheer embodiment of discontinuity exploited in the service of continuity. The presentation underlined its gentle pathos, charging it with meaning, with a mix of fragility and determination—a keynote of the times recast as something totally universal. The figure’s kneeling posture can, perhaps, be seen as a gesture of humility, or even as an admission of guilt. It may remind today’s viewers of the famous scene of Federal German Chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees in Warsaw in 1970. On the other hand, Lehmbruck’s ostracised sculpture stood on the side of the victims rather than that of the perpetrators. For that very reason, in 1955 it appeared as an invitation to reverse the perspective of perpetrator and victim or to diffuse it into vagueness.

In the documenta photos it almost looks as if Lehm­ bruck’s sculpture is indeed homeless, without shelter; only thin struts are discernible overhead. Although there was a solid roof over the sculpture, it is note­ worthy that the photos barely show it.

Some paintings were mounted on delicate supports.

The impression of fragility, of shaky ground, will have been intentional, fitting what had become a highly elegant aesthetic of ruins in these rooms that literally incorporated the works of art instead of just providing a background for them. But perhaps this refers again to the assertion of continuity or the precise tipping point at which the staging fulfils its purpose: the trans­for­ mation of discontinuity into continuity. For the chapter of discontinuity that the documenta had undoubtedly opened was only intended to be a chapter, a stage in a history that had its plot points but reached its goal all the happier for that. These paintings on their stalks: don’t they look like flowers? Isn’t the story told here a narrative of blossoming, of healing, the story of the

years from 1945 to 1955? Life goes on, it sprouts from the rubble and will cover it over. As we know, the main exhibition took place next door: the Federal German Garden Show, which presented the topic almost as impressively, if perhaps somewhat more crudely, not to say rankly.

What, then, does the exploitation of the rupture consist of? Simply, in aestheticising the rubble of Kassel and shoving it like a stage set in front of the rubble of Guernica, Warsaw, and Leningrad. The Germans’ own wounds were abstracted to become the wounds of human­kind as a whole, and yet the wounds of the victims of Nazism, which are indeed of universal concern for humankind as a whole, were thus hidden in the process.

What was shown was that which could be shown, concealing the impossibility of showing what had actually happened. Modernism had been allowed to flourish in the ruins, concealing thereby the irreparably destroyed ruin that modernism was in 1955 and has remained ever since.

Presentation in Pieces Walter Grasskamp recently contrasted the first docu­ menta with Muriel, which Alain Resnais filmed in Boulogne-sur-Mer, a destroyed and rebuilt town.13 The film is about the impossibility of returning to the prewar period, and for this reason alone it gives a more truthful picture of the postwar situation than the exhibition in Kassel. The astonishing thing is that Resnais already showed in 1963 what had gone wrong in Kassel. The film not only shows the ruptures, it also shows the putty that was used to fill them and the way postwar modernism had been stuck together. In this film, the present, and every object in it, is false: the electric fireplace in the protagonist’s apartment, the furniture with the price tags hanging on it. And Resnais tears apart this patchworked modernism with a dialectic of cuts that leaves no stone unturned. In this film, montage is the demolition of false reality.

Probably no exhibition has ever achieved anything similar. But one show worth mentioning is the 1953 Picasso exhibition in Milan, which was closely related to the documenta. Bode said it had influenced his design of the documenta.14 The parallels are striking. The Milan show was also held in a wartime ruin, the Palazzo Reale, and, as in Kassel, paintings were displayed on stands.

Here, too, of course, this was a staging, an aestheti­ cisation. The inappropriateness could not, and never can, be avoided, so a way had to be found to deal with it. And in this respect there is a world of difference between Milan and Kassel. In Milan, too, discontinuity was staged, but in contrast to Kassel it was not minimised, and certainly not exploited for the sake of continuity. The curators wanted to increase awareness

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1

Haftmann, Werner: “Ein­leitung”. In: documenta.

Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts.

Munich 1955, pp. 15–25, esp. pp. 23–24.

12 Cf. Buergel, Roger M.: “Der Ursprung”. In: Michael Glasmeier and Karin Stengel (eds.): Archive in motion.

Documenta-Handbuch.

50 Jahre documenta

2 Ibid., p. 16; for the subsequent quotes, see p. 16, 17.

1955–2005. Göttingen 2005, pp. 173–180, esp. p. 176.

3 Grasskamp, Walter: Die unbewältigte Moderne. Kunst und Öffentlichkeit. Munich 1989, p. 118.

13 Cf. Grasskamp, Walter: “Gefilterte Avantgarde. Zum Kunstverständnis der ersten documenta 1955”. In: Birgit Jooss, Philipp Oswalt, and ­Daniel Tyradellis (eds.): bauhaus documenta. vision und marke. Leipzig 2019, pp. 30–33, esp. p. 33.

4 Adorno, Theodor W.: “Auferstehung der Kultur in Deutschland?” In: Idem: Kritik.

Kleine Schriften zur Gesellschaft. Ed. Günter Busch.

Frankfurt a. M. 1971, pp. 20–33, esp. p. 31.

5 Platschek, Hans: “Schüsse in Hornberg oder Der Streit um die Avantgarde”. In: Jürgen Habermas (ed.): Stichworte zur “Geistigen Situation der Zeit”, vol. 2. Frankfurt a. M. 1979, pp. 615–635, esp. p. 626.

6 Haftmann, Werner: “Geo­ graphie und unsere bewusste Kunstsituation”. In: Kunst der Nation 2/20 (1934), p. 3, 4.

7 Quoted from notes from a conversation with Mascha Kaléko, in: Idem: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 4.

Munich 2012, commentary, pp. 630–633, esp. p. 632, 633.

14 Cf. Korn, Samuel: “Eine dritte Ordnung. Verschiebungen in der inszenatorischen Praxis der documenta”. In: Ibid., pp. 132–137, esp. p. 132.

Modern Art is the Best Medicine

of the rupture, however helpless this attempt might have been in the face of the real dimension. The ruin in Milan was really in a ruinous state: the debris could not be used as a foundation. The exhibition’s organisers had fought in the Resistenza, had left Italy under the fascists or had been imprisoned. Eugenio Reale, like Picasso, was a Communist Party member. Picasso was reputedly persuaded to show his works because the exhibition was held in the burned-out Palazzo Reale.

The art in those ruins—Picasso’s Guernica, War and Peace, The Charnel House, and Massacre in Korea— denounced the causes of the destruction. It showed the victims of 1937 and 1953, adopting their perspective to motivate the general public to take action. Whether art can and should do that is a different question. But artists like Picasso or Resnais believed it and they made proposals. The public in Milano got to hear these proposals and the public in Kassel did not. There is something uncanny about the fact that the documenta founders took the experience of this particular exhibition and turned it into its opposite.

8 Bode, Arnold: “Autobiographische Notizen”. In: Arnold Bode, Leben + Werk (1900–1977) (Exh. cat., Staatliche Museen, Kassel). Ed. Marianne Heinz.

Kassel 2000, pp. 142–147, esp. p. 142.

9 Fuhrmeister, Christian: “Statt eines Nachworts: Zwei Thesen zu deutschen Museen nach 1945”. In: Julia Friedrich and Andreas Prinzing (eds.): “So fing man einfach an, ohne viele Worte”. Ausstellungs­ wesen und Sammlungspolitik in den ersten Jahren nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg.

Cologne 2013, pp. 234–239, esp. p. 239.

10 Adorno, Auferstehung, p. 30.

11 Quoted in Kimpel, Harald: documenta. Mythos und Wirklichkeit. Cologne 1997, p. 108 and 163.

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documenta 1: A New Start Through Canonisation?

documenta 1: A New Start Through Canonisation?

Bernhard Fulda

What did the 1955 documenta have to do with Nazism?

Walter Grasskamp, one of the pioneers of German exhibition history, gave a clear answer to this question in the late 1980s in his book, Die unbewältigte Moderne (Unresolved Modernism): In the first place, the documenta was a “counter exhibition” to the notorious Nazi pro­ paganda show Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), a “re­ sponse to the trauma … that was connected with this malicious show”. It was, so to speak, the wishful attempt of the documenta’s “founding fathers” to revise Entartete Kunst as if it were “a regrettable lapse”.1 This intention was also reflected in the staging of the exhibition: Even before the documenta visitors saw the first original work of art, they were greeted at the back of the entrance hall by a photo wall with large portrait photos of the artists showing in the exhibition. Grasskamp saw this photo wall as a reaction to the Nazis’ ostracism of the artists, as a demonstrative response to Paul Schultze-Naum­ burg’s book Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race) published in 1928, which compared and contrasted physiognomic and physical disfigurements with modern portraits and nude representations.2 Grasskamp commented: “The poster-size portrait photo as an expression of remarkable individuality is counterposed to the Nazi assertion of invalidity.”3 In his opinion, however, to win favour with middle-class visitors the works of modern art exhibited in Kassel had been “defused” of content.

There was no mention of important sources of inspi­ ration—of “liaisons dangereuses”—such as the art of children or mentally ill people, or the art of peoples colonised by Europe, so-called “primitive art”; the

latter was combined in a photo installation with archaeolo­g ical found objects in the entrance hall, emptied of temporality, with the result that modern art was situated within a tradition of the tendency to abstraction that went back to ancient times. Other gaps that Grasskamp identified included the failure to rehabilitate persecuted Jewish artists like Felix Nuss­ baum or Otto Freundlich, whose work Großer Kopf (Large Head) was reproduced on the cover of the exhibition guide. There was also no serious discussion about the accusation of “art Bolshevism” and the socially critical, politically committed tendencies of Classical Modernism—in other words, “no Grosz and no John Heartfield.”4 Grasskamp’s interpretation refers to the arthistorical method of image comparison: here an image, there a comparable image; here the ostracising show Entartete Kunst, the most successful (or at least, the most-visited) exhibition of contemporary art ever shown; there, to distinguish from this past history, the new start of the German Federal Republic through canonising what had once been ostracised. But with this method it is easy to forget which continuities and references to older traditions influenced the first documenta. My thesis is that the relationship between the exhibition strategies of the 1950s and the complex of the interwar years was closer and more complicated.

This does not mean, however, that there is any question about the long-term effects of the Entartete Kunst exhibitions. Even after the war it was the most important reference point for many observers of the contemporary German exhibition scene. As early as January 1946 Erich Kästner concluded after an ex­hi­ bition that the vehement rejection of modern, and particularly abstract art, notably by younger visitors, was an after-effect of this Nazi propaganda campaign and of their aesthetic socialisation within Nazi ideology.

Back then, in his article Die Augsburger Diagnose. Kunst und deutsche Jugend (The Augsburg Diagnosis. Art and Young Germans) Kästner wrote that something must happen urgently, not just because of these young people, “but also for the sake of German art, because its natural growth, its development was artificially interrupted for twelve years!” Ultimately nothing less was at stake than “the value and prestige of German art.”5 It was essential, Kästner believed, to foster “education in taste by qualified experts”. Nine years later, one such expert, Werner Haftmann, in his foreword for the documenta catalogue, diagnosed the “concentrated use of the be­ guiling effect of the dogmas of mass happiness” during the years of Nazi rule as a fateful rupture of continuity in German cultural history that had led to a “cultural isolation of the nation”. Haftmann declared that the exhibition was neither for connoisseurs nor “to lecture

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Expressionism, the exhibition in Oslo was cited in a letter to Hermann Göring as a shining example of how “Jewish artists, and those elements that are Christian but have been tainted by Jewish-Marxist ideas … were deliberately kept away.”10 In the same summer the National Socialist German Students’ Union in Berlin organised the art show 30 deutsche Künstler (30 German Artists), which elevated Nolde and Ernst Barlach to the status of old masters of a revolutionary new German art. The most important publicity outlet for the efforts to showcase this kind of “defused” Modernism in the Third Reich was the newly founded magazine Kunst der Nation (Art of the Nation). The art activists trying to propagate this modern German art as compatible with Nazi ideology were mostly young, and included Alfred Hentzen, later a member of the documenta committee, and back then the head curator at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, and the young art historian Werner Haftmann, later the spiritus rector of the documenta.

For anyone interested in how nationalist conser­ va­tive circles succeeded in becoming integrated under the Nazis, there is no better lesson than Haftmann’s programmatic article, Geographie und unsere bewußte Kunstsituation (Geography and Our Conscious Art Situa­ tion), which appeared in the magazine in October 1934.

In this essay on the status of German art in the Western cultural tradition, Haftmann spoke of a providential mission embedded in the German spirit, “of blood and space”. What did this mean? The young art historian declared, “Our situation today is forcing us towards new and fundamental decisions that can no longer rely on historical achievements and solutions because the danger zone has completely shifted, because the monstrous threat of the Far East is rising over the structure of European intellectual life including, and indeed first and foremost that of the Germans, in order to attack the stabilised European concept of the personality with the opposing collective form of unified racial associations.” Haftmann argued that resistance should be the order of the day and art the chosen means. After the dominance of Western theories in the late 19th century, which took the form of Impressionism in art, the Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists’ groups had demarcated “the turning point of a new German mis­ sion”; this new movement had “internally said No to the West” and turned toward the East in what Haftmann called “the geographical determination of destiny”. He saw the West-East synthesis as originating from this “sharp opposition to the West”. Only Germany, he wrote, was in a position to achieve this synthesis, and it determined not only German art but was also to be found in the present political situation. “The political form of Western democracies is just as questionable for the Germans as Eastern-type political collectivism,”

documenta 1: A New Start Through Canonisation?

resistant people” but for “young people growing up, so that they may realise what kind of foundations were prepared for them and what has to be governed by authority and what has to be overcome.”6 Looking at the visual images with which this missionary principle was implemented, the choice of artists and works for the 1955 documenta quickly reveals that it was part of a much wider effort of canonisation which was aimed at re-evaluating and upgrading German art within a European framework. The great majority of art works shown at the documenta had already been displayed earlier at diverse art shows under the exhibition policy promoted by the Allied occupation authorities in the context of re-education since 1945.7 But this canonisation and political co-optation already began in the mid-1920s when, after the German defeat in a world war and the international ostracism because of the wartime atrocities and cultural bar­ barism, the new German art served as “a means of national self-assertion”.8 The teleological development towards abstract art in which German artists played a central role was also part of a patriotic cultural narrative of curators and art historians in the late 1920s, for example in the major overview of modern art, Vom Abbild zum Sinnbild (From Illustration to Symbol), shown in the Städel in Frankfurt in 1931. In particular, however, many exhibition makers were concerned with portraying the evolution in German art on an equal footing with— and largely independent from—the French development, and vigorously representing this narrative abroad as well. These efforts peaked in the highly controversial exhibition Neuere deutsche Kunst (Recent German Art) by the head curator of the Berlin National Gallery, Ludwig Thormaehlen, which was shown first in Oslo in 1932 and finally in Cologne. The exhibition makers deliberately excluded the German Impressionists— starting with Max Liebermann, a Jewish artist, the founder of the Berliner Secession and president of the Prussian Academy of Arts at that time.9 Almost simultaneously the director of the National Gallery in Berlin, Ludwig Justi, had Liebermann’s paintings removed from the Kronprinzenpalais and transferred them from the ‘museum of living artists’ to the National Gallery building, which was devoted to 19th-century art. Parallel to this, Justi purchased recent Expressionist works such as Emil Nolde’s painting from 1931, Die Familie (The Family).

After the Nazis took power in 1933, this new arthistorical grading of contemporary art provided the opportunity for numerous proponents of that type of classical ‘German’ modernism to offer their services as art experts to the new rulers. During the internal Nazi party debate about an appropriate kind of revolutionary art, particularly in relation to so-called Nordic

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Haftmann wrote. “If the form of community in today’s Germany was raised as a new political demand, it was because it embodied the expression of a unified German will, but at the same time, seen from a united European perspective, as the establishment of that synthesis of West and East, of the Western concept of individualism and the Eastern collective.” The article ends with an invocation of the heroes of Nordic Expressionism, Barlach, Nolde, and Christian Rohlfs: “Their fulfilment of the mission is as German as could be, and also belongs to the future because it regroups the European image of art, no longer locating it in the West, but cen­ tral­ising it as German, conceiving it as a German WestEast mission under its unity, the unity of the West-East synthesis.”11 Naturally Haftmann could not pursue this invo­ca­ tion of a special German path, a “new German mission” so easily after 1945. But the parallels and continuities are impossible to ignore. In 1955, in his introduction to the documenta catalogue, he explained again that the “special German situation” required a “broad approach deriving from history”; by then, however, the postulate from 1934 of a “West-East synthesis” was subsumed within a wider notion of “European integration”. And at the documenta in 1955 the works of Barlach, Nolde and Rohlfs were still shown in a room together. Incidentally, with this kind of new adaptation of an old art narrative to the now-changed political circumstances Haftmann was no different from other former colleagues in the pre-1937 Expressionism controversy. After 1945 many of them reappeared, reporting in the art columns of the weekly Die Zeit.12 After their failed attempts in 1937 to canonise Expressionism as genuine German art, they now had a new opportunity.

These continuities in the canonisation of a good national German art are important for properly under­ standing the 1955 documenta. Of the 58 German artists who exhibited at the first documenta, 31 had already shown at the exhibition Neuere deutsche Kunst (Recent German Art) in 1932, some of them with the same works, like Emil Nolde’s Familie (Family). But the continuity of the missing works is also indicative: just as in 1932, Max Liebermann was omitted in 1955, only this time it caused no scandal. At the same time, many people involved in documenta 1 had a common interest in as­ sert­ing that there had been a rupture in continuity which had already begun in 1933. This obviated closer exami­ nation and discussion of their own, decidedly ambivalent role during the Nazi period.

Take the case of Werner Haftmann who, at the age of 25, on 1 October 1937—just a few weeks after the Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich—was admitted into the Nazi Party. In 1939 his then boss recommended him as a loyal National Socialist for a job

as an assistant to Hans Sedlmayr at Vienna University.13 Or consider the documenta working group member Alfred Hentzen, who joined the Nazi Party relatively late, in 1941.14 In Berlin after 1945 this party member­ ship represented an “insurmountable obstacle” to his re-appointment at the National Gallery. This led him to move shortly afterwards to the British occupied zone where, as he confided to Emil Nolde in December 1946, “these difficulties have already been resolved for me”.15 Another example is the landscape architect Hermann Mattern, who conceived the West German National Garden Show in 1955 in Kassel, and who actually thought up the original idea of an art exhibition to accompany this horticultural event. Mattern, a close colleague of Arnold Bode and a founding member of the supporting association for the documenta, Abend­ ländische Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts e. V. (Society for Western Art of the Twentieth Century) had been re­ spon­sible for the Reich Garden Show under the Nazis in Stuttgart in 1939.16 Yet again, Carl Gussone, assistant departmental head at the Federal German Interior Ministry, who approved the funding for the documenta, joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1933 and later, as a government financial official, was probably involved in the discrimination against Jews. Following his success­ ful reinstatement, in 1951 he refused financial support for a meeting to foster understanding between Jews and non-Jews on the grounds that people could not seriously talk of any “widespread anti-Semitism in the German nation”.17 Given such biographical entanglements, it seemed obvious to summarise the situation of art during the Nazi period under the blanket concept of ostracism and persecution and thus disambiguate it. Haftmann’s escapist but all the more powerful description of an alleged internal exile of the modern artist under Nazi rule, which he presented in his introduction to the documenta catalogue, was symptomatic: “… the artist went underground, painted in laundry rooms, modelled in derelict factory halls and fed himself like the lilies in the field.” 18 This rhetorical isolation from the art business in the Nazi era effectively attributed aesthetic autonomy, and consequently moral and political in­teg­ ri­ty, to individual artists. They were stylised as martyrs in the struggle for artistic freedom. And in the process, a little bit of glory was reflected on the people who had stood up for these artists during the Third Reich: regardless of any personal conformity under the Nazis, one had been on the ‘good’ side.

This also casts a new light on the most innovative and unusual part of the staging of the 1955 documenta— the photo exhibition of artists’ portraits in the entrance hall. This was not simply art history as the ‘history of great men’. Some time ago, research by historians of

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1

2 3 4 5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Grasskamp, Walter: Die unbewältigte Moderne. Kunst und Öffentlichkeit. Munich 1989, p. 98, 76.

Cf. ibid., p. 113.

Ibid., p. 90.

Ibid., p. 97.

Kästner, Erich: “Die Augsburger Diagnose. Kunst und deutsche Jugend” (first published in Neue Zeitung, 7.1.1946). In: Idem.: Werke, vol 2. Ed. Franz Josef Görtz.

Munich and Vienna 1998, pp. 28-33.

Haftmann, Werner: “Ein­leitung”. In: documenta.

Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts.

Munich 1955, pp. 15-25, esp. p. 25.

Of key importance here were the exhibition Kunstschaffen in Deutschland (1949 in Kunsthaus Zurich, then in Central Collecting Point, Munich), and the Blaue Reiter exhibition organised by Ludwig Grote (also 1949, in Haus der Kunst, Munich) which, in turn, strongly influenced Eberhard Hanftstaengl’s presentations of German art at the Biennale in Venice in 1950 und 1952.

Kratz-Kessemeier, Kristina: Kunst für die Republik. Die Kunstpolitik des preußischen Kulturministeriums 1918 bis 1932. Berlin 2008, p. 164 ff., pp. 541-544.

Lörz, Markus: Neuere deutsche Kunst. Oslo, Copenhagen, Cologne 1932. Rekonstruktion und Dokumentation. Unpub­lished dissertation, Heidelberg and Stuttgart 2008.

Wilhelm-Adolf Farenholtz (Magdeburg) to Hermann Göring, 25.6.1933, quoted in Lörz: Neuere deutsche Kunst, p. 87.

Haftmann, Werner: “Geographie und unsere bewußte Kunstsituation”. In: Kunst der Nation 20 (Oct. 1934), pp. 3-4, esp. p. 4.; Cf. Soika, Aya: “Die Zeitschrift Kunst der Nation”.

In: Hoffmann and Soika (eds.): Flucht in die Bilder?, pp. 83-87, Ill. p. 87.

Aside from Werner Haftmann they included Alfred Hentzen, Bruno E. Werner and Paul Fechter. Cf. Fitzke, Kirsten : “Auf dem Weg zur documenta.

Die Wochenzeitung DIE ZEIT und ihr Autor Werner Haftmann spiegeln und gestalten Positionen bildender Kunst in Westdeutschland”. In: Simon Großpietsch and Kai-Uwe Hemken (eds.): documenta 1955. Ein ­wissenschaftliches

Lesebuch, Kassel 2018, pp. 249-265.

13 For Haftmann’s Nazi Party membership, see Fulda, Bernard: “Die Entstehung einer deutschen Nachkriegslegende”. In: Idem.: Emil Nolde.

Eine deutsche Legende. Der Künstler im Nationalsozialismus. Ill. Anthology. Ed. Bernhard Fulda, Christian Ring, Aya Soika. Munich 2019, pp. 221-244, esp. p. 232, note 56; for Vienna, see Aurenhammer, Hans H.: “Hans Sedlmayr und die Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Wien 1938– 1945”. In: Jutta Held and Martin Papenbrock (eds.): Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft, vol. 5: Kunstgeschichte an den Universitäten im National­ sozialismus. Göttingen 2003, p. 167.

14 Cf. NSDAP-Gaukartei, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Barch R 9361-IX Kartei/14961437; I am grateful to Julia Friedrich for the information.

15 Letter from Alfred Hentzen to Emil Nolde, 13.12.1946. Archiv der Nolde Stiftung Seebüll.

16 Cf. Großpietsch, Simon: “­Where did it all go wrong?

Fatum und Faktum der ­documenta 1955”. In: Großpietsch and Hemken (eds.): documenta 1955, pp. 13-17.

17 Quoted in Palm, Stefanie: “Auf der Suche nach dem ­starken Staat. Die Kultur-, Medien- und Wissenschaftspolitik”. In: Frank Bösch and Andreas Wirsching (eds.): Hüter der Ordnung. Die Innenministerien in Bonn und Ost-Berlin nach dem Nationalsozialismus. Göttingen 2018, pp. 594-634, p. 608.

18 Haftmann: “Einleitung”, pp. 16-17.

19 Cf. Pohlmann, Ulrich: “‘Nicht beziehungslose Kunst, sondern politische Waffe’.

Fotoausstellungen als Mittel der Ästhetisierung von Politik und Ökonomie im National­ sozialismus”. In: Foto­ geschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 8/28 (1988), pp. 17-31; Thamer, Hans-­ Ulrich: “Geschichte und Propaganda. Kulturhistorische Ausstellungen in der NS-Zeit”. In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 24/3 (1998), pp. 349-381.

20 Grasskamp: Die unbewältigte Moderne, pp. 98-99.

documenta 1: A New Start Through Canonisation?

photography and culture revealed that in the 1930s design elements such as photomontages and large-scale photo displays evolved to become an indispensable part of Nazi propaganda exhibitions. Sacral cultic halls of honour decorated with photos were used to stir up emotions and were part of a strategy by exhibition makers to overwhelm the public and achieve their political and educational mission. Examples include major spectacles like the 1936 Triennale in Milan and the exhibition Gebt mir vier Jahre Zeit! (Give Me Four Years!) in Berlin in 1937.19 But if we look at the research and literature on the documenta it almost appears as if— with the exception of the Entartete Kunst shows—only exhibitions after 1945 could have influenced the two main protagonists, Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann.

The multiple innovations of international exhibition technology in the 1930s seem completely irrelevant.

In fact, in the case of the photo wall in Kassel, the visual traces go much further back. Ultimately, this “portrait wall of the heroes of the middle-class”20 was not only about presenting the artists to the public as respectable middle-class people in suits, as Walter Grass­kamp declared, in order to refute Schultze-Naum­ burg’s pamphlet Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race). In fact, these photos on a dark background recall a much older German tradition of hero worship—the honour plaques with portrait photos of heroes who died for the father­ land, and of the surviving combatants after the First World War. Here, in the honourable remembrance of a self-sacrificing male fighting community who gave their lives for the great national mission, was the starting point for the inflated concept of the ‘national com­mu­ ni­ty’ extolled later by the Nazis. This iconography continued in the 1930s, and the Nazis used it for pro­ paganda purposes. The Nazi Party’s Old Guard fighters were also honoured on such plaques.

A large part of the public in Kassel in 1955 would have been sufficiently well versed visually to be able to associate the intention of the monumental ‘plaque of honour’ in the documenta entrance hall with this tra­di­tion.

The artists represented there were pro­claimed as a kind of foundation, and as setting the trend for the present.

This homage to the ‘Old Guard’ of Modernism at the first documenta intermingled the most widely varying traditions and lines of development. Haftmann’s invocation of the “undisputed evil geniuses of this epoch” in his introduction in the documenta catalogue contained exactly the mixture of hero worship and cult of the artist-Führer, of historical mission and “defused” national pride, that enabled West German society to become integrated, through the lens of modern art, into a Western community of values and ideas, and at the same time to keep the real “liaison dangereuse”, the epoch of Nazism, at a safe distance.

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Art as Consonance with Universal Harmony Werner Haftmann’s concept of a ‘harmonical’ art at the documenta in 1955 as reconciliation with the Nazi past and idiom of a free world.

Art as Consonance with Universal Harmony

Eckhart J. Gillen

In the 1960s Sigmar Polke ironically tackled the ‘good art’ of Modernism as it was presented at the first documenta in 1955. His Vitrinenstück (Das Bild, das auf Befehl höherer Wesen gemalt wurde)—Showcase Piece (The Picture that was Painted by Command of Higher Beings), was a parody on the power of art experts in the 1950s who declared abstraction to be the compulsory idiom of every public statement about art.

Werner Haftmann was undoubtedly the most influential ‘higher being’ whose aesthetic ‘commands’ a painter had to obey to have a career in postwar Ger­ many. As early as 1934 Haftmann published an essay Zur Vielfältigkeit deutscher Kunst (On the Diversity of German Art)1 in the journal Kunst der Nation. In re­ trospect the text can be seen as the blueprint for his ‘harmonical’ concept of art at the 1955 documenta, with which he wanted to construct an elegant bridge over the breach of civilisation that occurred during the Nazi period. Haftmann’s essay asserted that German art had always been defined by an antithesis of “clear form and expressive form” which could be traced back through the ages.

This contribution from 1934 was indubitably meant to defend the prevailing diversity of contempo­ rary artistic languages in Germany against the political conformity the Nazis were enforcing on artistic styles.

Moreover, Haftmann was obviously concerned with defining the position of Expressionism in 1934. He argued that, “Die ‘Brücke’, which appeared so resolute and complete, actually consisted of two distinct inten­ tions in painting which are embodied for us in two

names, Kirchner and Otto Mueller. Kirchner’s wood­ cuts, in particular, provided examples of unprecedented formal imagination … Otto Mueller was quite different … Otto Mueller’s art lived from proportions, from struc­ture and internal content.” In the art of the early 1930s Haftmann found “the structural elements of Classicism” in “all their purity” in the works of con­ temporaries like Karl Hofer and his circle: “Stability and security of the visual structure, superior and deliberate formal brevity, simplicity and degree of feeling.” On the other hand, Haftmann argued, the expressive form of modernism, “is present for all of us, seems nearly too present, making it harder to recognise the classical works of our epoch. The great represen­ta­ tive of this excited and passionate form is Nolde; once again, in his own way, he fully summarises all the mystical and painful excitement of this blazing era.”

According to Haftmann, the dichotomy between Hofer and Nolde epitomised the antithesis of clear form and expressive form at that time, and shaped “modern German art”. For the future, Haftmann wished for a synthesis of clear and expressive form which artists should use to harness external and internal chaos through a ‘classical’ canon of forms. He listed concepts like the aforementioned as structural elements of this new ‘Classicism’.2 Haftmann’s concept for the 1955 documenta focused again on Emil Nolde as the representative of an “excited and passionate form” and Karl Hofer, along with Willi Baumeister as exponents of a clear form.

Research by Bernhard Fulda and Aya Soika3 reveals that Haftmann almost canonised Nolde, arguing that as an artist in internal exile he had remained true to himself.

Of course Nolde had to keep silent about his Nazi Party membership, just as Haftmann hid his own membership from the public. Haftmann saw Nolde as a central bridging figure and a pillar of his thesis of the unbroken continuity of German Modernism above and beyond Nazi barbarism. Nolde’s work, he wrote “created … a sturdy scaffolding to span the precipitous emptiness of the most horrific abyss in German history, in which political hubris and collective acts of violence paraded around in big boots”.4 Haftmann saw Nolde as the symbolic figure of a better Germany. This ‘other’ Ger­ many was an intellectual power influenced by solitary artists who kept far away from politics.

In Haftmann’s 1934 essay the classical counter­ part to Nolde’s expressionist intensity was Karl Hofer; the 1955 documenta also showed a selection of his works. Yet in the mid-1950s he fell out of favour with Haftmann and the art critic Will Grohmann. Following a famous quarrel about the value of abstract art,5 on 18 July 1955 in a broadcast for South German Radio, Grohmann declared that Hofer, who died on 3 April

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The dogma advocated here of a kind of art purified and emptied of all content evolved its anaesthetising effect in the 1950s. Haftmann denied art any political content and declared that any attempt to understand art as a ‘political matter’ was a rape of “the idea of creative freedom which is the essence of modern art.”12 The opposing position was taken by Theodor W. Adorno, who had returned to Germany after his exile during the Nazi period. Adorno began with the shocked realisation that even the participants at that meeting, highly educated progressive experts and artists, almost obsessively avoided any reflection on the recent past.

This was symptomatic of the situation at that time in both West and East Germany. Adorno was the only participant in the discussion who identified with “the extreme form of modern art”. He accused Kurt Leonhard, and especially Willi Baumeister—and implicitly Werner Haftmann, who was not at the meeting—of trivialising modern art by asserting that it was striving for new harmonies, but this was only a cover for the old idea of cosmic harmony from an esoteric prewar modernism.

Adorno added that however much he disagreed with Sedlmayr’s cultural conservatism, he agreed with him that the ‘moment of negativity’ was essential in mo­dern art. On this point, Adorno argued, Sedlmayr saw “something very right which was usually neglected by a belief in progress that was too unbroken and naïve.”

The harmony of the modern work of art, Adorno said, consists precisely in the fact that it expresses “what is torn and internally unreconciled without transposing it, and can stand that”, whereas “any attempt now to use the idea of the cosmic to implement this harmony directly in modern art actually results in us being ashamed of exposing ourselves and thus wanting to build the very bridge to the past that we should be tearing down.”13 Adorno’s demand for a break with a harmonising, reconciling Classical Modernism as the balance between expression and stable visual order corresponded to the positions in the 1940s and 1950s of French tachisme, German Informel, and American Abstract Expres­ sionism. While Haftmann’s favourites felt obliged by the principle of ‘discipline of the medium’14 to produce strong compositions and visual harmony, and their paintings very broadly reflected the successful unity of a rational, pro-technology, democratic society with magical, archaic and mythological elements, artists from the art brut and Informel movements like Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, and Wols (the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) de­ veloped a completely new existential form of art.

Triggered by ‘total war’, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, it abandoned all the isms to date including Cubism, Expressionism, Constructivism, geometric abstraction,

Art as Consonance with Universal Harmony

1955, was a renegade of modern art who had betrayed modernism and progress in art.

Haftmann agreed with this verdict and dropped Hofer from his selection for the second documenta in 1959, although Haftmann’s earlier texts had numbered both Hofer and Baumeister among the constructive artists working in the true proportions.6 The example of Hofer shows clearly that by the 1955 documenta at the latest, abstraction as an artistic language had become entrenched as an ideological formula. Hofer had obviously wilfully ignored the command of so-called higher beings to paint abstractly, and was punished with a damnatio memoriae.

The non-representational painter Willi Baumeister, on the other hand, remained as a representative of postwar modernism in the Federal Republic. Taking the human figure as his starting point he had concentrated on clear, unambiguous, geometric and organic surface forms and contours, which he had relinquished in the 1930s in favour of his Eidos and Gilgamesh painting series and ‘archaic figures’. Baumeister’s growing interest in prehistoric art fitted with the efforts to legitimise modern art by pointing to its kinship with archaic art, with the original beginnings of human art making, as it were. This could be seen in the famous photo panels of exotic and archaic artefacts that Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann placed in the entrance hall of the Fridericianum in 1955.7 Leopold Zahn com­ mented on this approach in his report on the first documenta in the magazine Das Kunstwerk that these artefacts were “often separated from us by thousands of years”, but “are intellectually and formally closer to modern art than far more recent works”.8 The art historian Kurt Leonhard recalled Haft­ mann’s argumentation from the 1930s at the Conference on the Human Image9 in Darmstadt in 1950. Defending modern art, Leonhard singled out Willi Baumeister and Karl Hofer, whom he saw as “representatives of a neoclassical will for order”. Replying to Hans Sedlmayr’s lecture Über die Gefahren der modernen Kunst (On the Dangers of Modern Art), Leonhard explained that mo­ dern art takes “elements of disorder and structures them into new cosmic orders … in which dissonant reality is not denied but … ‘suspended’”.10 Willi Bau­ meister was among those who openly agreed with Haftmann’s ‘harmonical’ theory of art and the world.

In contradiction to Sedlmayr’s assertion of the “loss of the centre”, Baumeister regarded himself as an artist by virtue of his “inalienable centre”, standing in harmony with nature and relating to transcendence as the intellectual child of Haftmann’s synthesis of intellect and form, expression and spirituality of a clarified modernism. “This centre is inalienable,” Baumeister declared.11

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Art as Consonance with Universal Harmony

and Realism. Like Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists at the same time in New York, these artists rejected anything arty, any kind of image-related composition, colourfulness, and beautiful smooth surfaces. They used paint as material like rough walls and muddy paths; they broke with all the principles of art, including modernist and avantgarde art. These artists fundamentally rejected an understanding of art that had been geared since the Enlightenment to progress, anticipation of the future, and Utopias, and aimed to be the harbinger of a better world. Yet in contrast to Pop Art and nouveau realisme, they still belonged to a pathos-ridden modernism based on the artist as a lonely, tragic hero.

But Haftmann had fundamental problems with this attitude. He argued that the Informel artists “destroyed the quadrature of a picture that had been evolved since Giotto, a particular quadrature of a surface on which forms play gracefully.”15 Haftmann’s overall view of art, both in his book Malerei im 20. Jahr­ hundert (Twentieth-Century Painting) from 1954, and at the documenta in 1955, left out almost all the important proponents of Informel and Abstract Expressionism, such as Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Tobey—which may be explicable for the documenta on the grounds of cost.16 On the other hand, Dubuffet and Fautrier, as well as Hartung and Wols, were also missing; the latter were listed as emigres in France in the book’s list of partici­ pating countries. According to Haftmann, painters like Pollock with their “psychic automatism” only operated “at the edge of art”,17 on the border between high art and lay art. Haftmann categorised Pollock’s method as ‘psychography’, an uncontrolled act of wild mani­pu­ lation of the canvas, abandoned to chance and flouting all the rules. The Informel painter Gerhard Hoehme rightly commented in retrospect, “There were no inter­ preters of ‘tachisme’ in Germany!”18 The ‘global language of abstraction’ had barely celebrated its triumph in the form of documenta II in 1959 with Werner Haftmann pronouncing his apodictic statement “Art has become abstract”19 in the catalogue when, parallel to the show in Kassel, in July 1959 at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, informal art was mocked by Jean Tinguely’s Métamatic robotic drawing machine which produced an endless sequence of variable tachisme-style stain pictures on a roll of paper. Flyers invited members of the public to “paint your own abstract picture with Tinguely’s Métamatics.” The journal magnum commented ironically: “The stain painting of the past ten years, tachisme, which was feted at the documenta, had been taken to absurd lengths … The way was open again and new, uncharted waters awaited the painters.”20

In April 1959 Friedrich Achleitner and Gerhard Rühm drove a motor scooter through the auditorium of the second ‘literary cabaret’ of the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) and smashed an intact grand piano to pieces with an axe on the stage. They were resolved to take an axe to the existential lie of the nation state that saw itself as Hitler’s first victim, and to destroy the cosy atmosphere of Austrian contentment.

The neo-avantgarde had finally caught up with the destructive act Adorno demanded as a sign of rupture with the past and a new beginning. But its entry into the halls of the Fridericianum had to wait until documenta 5 under Harald Szeemann in 1972.

Werner Haftmann evidently remained tied all his life to the intellectual world of his generation, which had looked for a new orientation after the catastrophe of the First World War. They wanted to bring clarity and simplicity into the chaos of the world around them.

Haftmann found this in prewar modernism, which made an abstraction of the confusing material world, in the works of Hofer and in Nolde as the antithesis and then, after 1945, in Baumeister’s painting. The eternal values were to be purified from “the cladding of history”, and the material world was to be rethought “in con­ nections of an abstract nature”.21 Haftmann saw his ideal artistic figure in the autonomy of art, in the nobility of mind of a solitary artist working on his own, beyond the masses—a figure continuously creating his oeuvre, untouched by con­ temporary events and politics. In his foreword to the catalogue for documenta II in 1959 Haftmann declared abstract art to be the logical culmination of a long artistic evolution. The discourse about the global language of art became an ideological formula in the global cultural battle between the liberal free market economy and the collective planned economy. With this position he made his name, consciously or un­con­ sciously, as one of the leading strategists in the visual arts field in the Cold War of cultures.

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Haftmann, Werner: “Zur Vielfältigkeit deutscher Kunst”. In: Kunst der Nation 24 (2.12.1934), pp. 1–2.

2 See ibid. for all quotations.

3 Soika, Aya and Fulda, Bernhard: Emil Nolde. Eine deutsche Legende. Chronik und Dokumente. Ed. Bernhard Fulda, Christian Ring and Aya Soika. Munich 2019, pp. 221–244.

4 Haftmann, Werner: Emil Nolde.

Ungemalte Bilder. Cologne 1963, p. 9.

5 The argument simmered from 1953 on, reaching its climax and conclusion with Karl Hofer’s article “Der Mut, unmodern zu sein”. In: Der Tagesspiegel, 11.2.1955, and Will Grohmann’s reply, “Respekt vor den Tatsachen.

Ein Wort für die moderne Kunst”. In: Der Tagesspiegel, 18.2.1955.

6 At the 1955 documenta Baumeister, with seven pictures, was represented on a par with Hofer, who showed six paintings, while documenta II in 1959 only showed Baumeister, with eleven paintings.

7 Cf. Grasskamp, Walter: “‘Entartete Kunst’ und documenta I. Verfemung und Entschärfung der Moderne”. In: Idem.: Die unbewältigte Moderne.

Kunst und Öffentlichkeit.

Munich 1989, pp. 76–119.

8 Zahn, Leopold: documenta.

In: Das Kunstwerk 2 (1955/56), pp. 15–16, quoted in Kimpel, Harald and Stengel, Karin: documenta 1955. Bremen 1995, p. 14.

9 The discussion took place in the Stadthalle, Darmstadt, 15.–17.7.1950 during the Summer Exhibition of the Neue Darmstädter Sezession on the topic Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, in which J. A. Schmoll, known under the pseudonym Eisenwerth, showed an overview of works since Impressionism ranging from Expressionism, Surrealism, and Realism to Abstract Art. Aside from artists, the participants ­included art historians, art critics and scientists from

Emil Nolde in the Federal German Chancellery

the fields of philosophy, theology, physics, medicine, and sociology.

10 Evers, Hans Gerhard (ed.): Darmstädter Gespräch.

Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit. Darmstadt 1951, p. 112 f.

The Mutability of Historical Evaluations

11 Baumeister, Willi, in: Ibid., p. 146 f.

Aya Soika

12 Haftmann, Werner: “Moderne Kultur und ihre ‘politische Idee’”. In: Jahresring 57/58 (1957). Quoted in idem: Skizzenbuch. Zur Kultur der Gegenwart, Munich 1960, pp. 66–76.

13 Adorno, Theodor W.: Darmstädter Gespräch, p. 215 f.

14 Haftmann, Werner: Paul Klee.

Wege bildnerischen Denkens.

Munich 1950, p. 119.

15 Werner Haftmann interviewed by Thomas Kempas.

In: Thema Informel. Part 1: Zur Struktur einer anderen Zeit (exh. cat. Städtisches Museum Schloss Morsbroich).

Leverkusen 1973, pp. 84–103, pp. 201–203, esp. p. 201.

16 The only artists listed in the book as North Americans are the German emigres Josef Albers and the largely unknown Kurt Roesch from Berlin, and Alexander Calder.

This changed in the following documenta exhibition, at which the Americans con­ stituted almost a third of the participating artists.

17 Haftmann, Werner: Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert. Munich 1954, p. 464.

18 Gerhard Hoehme, Düsseldorf, 21.1.1972. In: Manfred de la Motte (ed.): Dokumente zum deutschen Informel. Galerie Hennemann, Bonn 1976, p. 82.

19 Haftmann, Werner: Intro­ duction. In: documenta 2.

Kunst nach 1945. Kassel 1959, p. 17.

20 Editorial. In: magnum. ­Zeitschrift für das moderne Leben 30 (June 1960).

21 Haftmann: Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert, p. 464.

Emil Nolde is particularly admired by a generation of Germans who still remember Siegfried Lenz’ book Deutschstunde (The German Lesson, first published in 1968) as a school text. Some of them even visited Nolde’s studio house and garden in Seebüll. Many of them grew up with the image of a ‘good’ German Modernism in which there was a clear distinction between the ostracised artists under the Nazis and their opponents. Nolde was probably one of the best-known German Expressionists persecuted by the Nazis. After the war, in the Federal German Republic his little watercolours—the Unpainted Pictures—were hailed as incunabula of a resistant German Modernism which was diametrically opposed to the clichéd image of Nazi art.

But there has long been doubt about counter­ posing the concept of an autonomous ‘pure’ Modernism to a figurative, ‘impure’ Nazi art. A closer look at the ­sources (such as artists’ letters, communications from the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, and other docu­ ments) reveals that such a clear distinction does not adequately describe individual careers and destinies in the Nazi era. In this respect Nolde’s situation is particularly complex, not least because he was con­ vinced himself that he was a good National Socialist artist1—not in a traditionalist academic sense but as a pioneer of a new, authentic ‘German’ art. Statements by numerous high-ranking Nazi Party functionaries confirm this. How do these insights fit with our under­ standing of modernism up to now? Over 20 years ago, art critics including E ­ duard Beaucamp, Jean Claire,

Emil Nolde in the Federal German Chancellery

1

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Emil Nolde in the Federal German Chancellery

and Walter Grasskamp had already pointed out that modernism was not always as cosmopolitan and demo­ cratic as we would like to think in retrospect.2 And even at that time they observed that many art lovers regarded it as a sacrilege to critically examine the cult sur­round­ ing modernism.

During the showing of the exhibition Emil Nolde.

Eine deutsche Legende. Der Künstler im National­sozialis­ mus3 (Emil Nolde. A German Legend. The Artist during the Nazi Regime), curated by Bernhard Fulda, Christian Ring and the present author, we noticed that it is dis­ turbing for people when clear distinctions become blurred, dearly held myths are questioned and more historical contextualisation than usual occurs in an art museum. The numerous emotional entries in the visitors’ books confirm that the topic of Nolde arouses strong feelings. They ranged from dismay about his anti-Semitism and recognition for the work of reappraisal to cursing the curators as traitors, and to comparisons between this 2019 exhibition and the Nazi propaganda show Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937. A number of comments concerned the ‘Merkel case’ in which two Nolde paintings that had hung in the German Chancellery, Brecher (Breakers, 1936) and Blumengarten A—Thersens Haus (Flower Garden A— Thersen’s House, 1915), were removed before the exhibition opened. Why did taking down these two pictures generate such great interest? And what does the incident—including the press coverage of it—mean in relation to the theme of the present magazine, the making of historical judgement, a reflection in the light of the past?

The opposing positions could roughly be sum­ marised as follows: Although Nolde is firmly established as a canonical German artist, today we know, for exam­ ple, that in the summer of 1933 he denounced his colleague, the artist Max Pechstein, to the Nazi Pro­ paganda Ministry as a “Jew”, and made anti-Semitic statements both publicly and privately. Given this, is it not inappropriate to show Nolde’s paintings without commentary in a representative political space such as the German Chancellery?4 Now, after a much-discussed exhibition has alerted the public to the insights of recent research, can state visitors be expected to take their seat beneath a Nolde painting? Or conversely, does the removal of artworks by a painter who has fallen into disgrace represent an act of ‘cleansing’ that contravenes the principles of artistic freedom and freedom of opinion, making things too easy for us and allowing us to avoid future discussions? Shouldn’t we learn to stand the ambiguities in German history—in this case using the example of the ‘entangled artist’ (the term stems from the title of Eduard Beaucamp’s 1988 book, Der Verstrickte Künstler)—and be able to

tolerate creative works on the walls by people whose views fail to match our own moral and ethical ideas?

To me, as an art historian, the justification for hanging or taking down a picture seems crucially important because it communicates the motivation for the action. At first, however, in the case of the two Nolde paintings that were returned to the lender (the National Museums in Berlin), there was no substantial explanation. Responding to questions from the press, the government spokesman declared that, “It is not a matter for the German Chancellor to make historical evaluations on this point.”5 But many people, not only journalists, were naturally very interested in knowing: What position does the German Chancellor take in the debate on the relationship between the artwork and the artist? Which mission does art fulfil in the Chancellery, and what criteria have to be considered? Indeed, the decision for Nolde’s works in 2006 reveals something about the function of art in promoting identity in political space. Particularly with regard to the category of historical and political judgement, it is worth historically situating the act of hanging as well as taking down and analysing the complete change of mind that occurred in the spring of 2019.

The Nolde Myth One of the aims of the aforementioned exhibition was to show how far the one-sided historical evaluation of Nolde made it possible for his pictures to reach the Chancellery in the first place. An earlier chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, not only hung Nolde’s seascape Meer III (Seascape III, 1947) and three brush and ink drawings in his office in Bonn, but the sign ‘Nolde Room’ also greeted visitors in metal letters on the door.6 The Federal Chancellor’s open admiration was only possible because less was known then about the artist than we know today, and because even the antiSemitic remarks to be read, for example, in Nolde’s 1934 memoirs Jahre der Kämpfe (Years of Struggle) could be relativised by referring to his subsequent ostracism and persecution. As a result, from the end of the Second World War the painter was primarily seen as a victim of Nazi art policy, an artist who had more of his works confiscated than anyone else and who was even allegedly banned from painting. In this context the story of the ‘unpainted pictures’, little watercolours that were created secretly and despite Gestapo sur­ veillance, made a very strong impression. Nolde himself provided the foundation for this myth in the third volume of his memoirs, Reisen, Ächtung, Befreiung (Travels, Ostracism, Liberation) which were written in 1946 and 1947 and published posthumously. The myth was further enhanced by the art historian Werner Haft­ mann with his two illustrated volumes commissioned

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comparable public discussion.12 Was the change made because the latest research results make it impossible to excuse Nolde’s anti-Semitism and his loyalty to Nazi ideology as opportunism or initial confusion? Which other established artist in the European modernist canon drew up a plan in 1933 for “selecting out the Jews” from German society, and had become so radi­ cally anti-Semitic in 1943 that he described the Second World War to his wife as the result of a conspiracy of “world Jewry” and as a “Jewish war”?13 Or was it the emergence of links to Nolde’s artistic achievement that related his biography and his works? But weren’t his available writings already sufficient evidence for the decision to take down the paintings? What role did the attention economy play here? What is the difference between ‘expert knowledge’ and a debate that even the tabloids pick up? And how has public discourse changed in recent years?

The decision-making process in this case is difficult to reconstruct; the precise reasons for the final decision to remove the paintings at that particular point in time remain obscure. Somewhat later, an article in the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel (titled Das Gunstwerk—The Favoured Work) reported that the rethinking had probably begun shortly before the exhibition opened. The journalist Jost Müller-Neuhof, who received access to the official record, discovered that the responsible department in the Chancellery was initially reluctant to agree to the Nolde show’s request for the Brecher painting—the painting was not to leave the Chancellor’s office even for the duration of the exhibition. The reason given was that the absence of the Nolde would “profoundly change the artistic atmosphere in the office’s seating area.”14 The officials argued that the painting had hung there since 2006, so long that it had become part of the identity of the Chancellor’s office. But shortly afterwards the aesthetically inspired wish to leave the picture as décor in its familiar place where visitors had seen it for years was evidently abandoned. The painting was sent to the exhibition in Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin and would not return to the Chancellery after the end of the exhibition. Moreover, Nolde’s painting Blumen­ garten (Flower Garden), which had not been requested for the show, was taken down at the same time.

If the hope was that such resolute action would avoid further discussion, it didn’t work out. Even the New York Times devoted a long article to the case, illustrating the online version with a photo of Barack Obama under the Nolde seascape in November 2016.

The national discussion about removing the paintings connected current politics and Germany’s complicated past, and was thus the ideal vehicle for presenting the German dilemma about Nolde abroad as well.15

Emil Nolde in the Federal German Chancellery

by the Nolde Foundation, Emil Nolde (1958) and Emil Nolde—Ungemalte Bilder (1963). And finally there was the writer Siegfried Lenz, who anticipated the viewpoint of Haftmann’s two books.

In Helmut Schmidt’s case, however, the choice of Nolde for his office space in the Federal Chancellery was closely linked to his own biography in the Nazi period, as shown by a letter he wrote to Lenz in De­cem­ ber 1968: “For me, since the age of 16, Emil Nolde, together with Ernst Barlach, was the greatest German artist of this century; his inclusion in the Nazi exhibition of so-called degenerate art was what caused me to renounce Nazism at the age of 17.”7 Schmidt’s letter—a reaction to reading Lenz’ Deutschstunde—illustrates how much the figure of the painter Nansen in the book was associated with Nolde (whose real surname was Hansen). Of course Lenz’ story goes far beyond the legend of the persecuted Nolde, yet the book played a major part in establishing this image, complete with the ‘painting ban’, both in Germany and abroad.

Nonetheless, even if this gave Nolde more prominence in Federal German art history than many other artists, and emphasised his victim status, there was always a lingering awareness of a different story— concerning some problematic passages in the memoirs, for example. Starting in the 1990s, several articles by experts were devoted to scrutiny of Nolde’s Nazi past.8 The topic was already a matter for public discussion in 1995 when a Nolde exhibition showed in London.9 In 2008, when Angela Merkel took a new edition of Nolde’s biographical memoir on her summer holiday, an article in the weekly Die Zeit by Florian Illies, What the Chancellor is Reading, referred to the anti-Semitic statements in the first edition of Nolde’s memoir Jahre der Kämpfe and spotlighted the problematic editorial history of the new editions.10 This raises the question of why the decision to take down the pictures was made specifically in the spring of 2019. Why was Nolde’s enthusiasm for Nazi ideology not mentioned in 2006 when the choice of paintings for Angela Merkel’s office was discussed?

Or in the autumn of 2013, when the journalist Stefan Koldehoff, writing in Die Zeit, cited a previously unpublished six-page manuscript by Nolde from De­ cem­ber 1938 which is full of anti-Semitic statements?11 Or in the spring of 2014, when the Nolde retrospective curated by Felix Krämer in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main led once again to an intensive discussion about Nolde’s attitude to Nazism? At that time, in the exhibition catalogue the curator already made the link to the present with a photo of Nolde’s painting Brecher in the Chancellery, and several essays in the catalogue examined Nolde’s ideological position critically. All the same, this failed to stimulate a

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Emil Nolde in the Federal German Chancellery

The controversy was probably also interesting because, without a universal agreement on a ‘correct’ approach, the decision is very closely linked with a personal understanding of art—which is reflected in the methodological diversity of the scientific study of art.

The definition of the relationship between art, artists, and the public sphere necessarily remains a dynamic process dependent on many constants.

In 1968 Walter Jens suggested that it would be an “act of piety” to protect Nolde against “the most dangerous approach, the personal interpretation” of the artist himself;16 in other words, we should separate Nolde the person from Nolde the artist. But this cannot be a general solution—as proved not least by the multiple opinions on the question of a Nolde painting above the sofa in the Chancellor’s office.

1

In mid-December 1940 Ada Nolde described her husband to Duška Schmitt (the wife of the constitutional law expert Carl Schmitt) as “a kind, German, National Socialist painter”. Quoted in Fulda, Bernhard, Ring, Christian and Soika, Aya (eds.): Emil Nolde.

Eine deutsche Legende.

Chronik und Dokumente.

Munich 2019, p. 175.

2 Clair, Jean: Die Verantwortung des Künstlers. Avantgarde zwischen Terror und Vernunft.

Cologne 1998; Beaucamp, Eduard: Der verstrickte Künstler. Wider die Legende von der unbefleckten Avantgarde. Cologne 1998; Grasskamp, Walter: Die unbewältigte Moderne, Munich 1989.

3 Exhibition 12.4.–15.9.2019 at the Neue Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof—­ Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin.

4 The first detailed description of this incident appeared in Fulda, Bernhard and Soika, Aya: Max Pechstein. The Rise and Fall of Expressionism.

Berlin and New York 2012, pp. 301–303.

5 Government spokesman Steffen Seibert, quoted in Kaube, Jürgen: “Das Nichts nach Nolde”. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28.8.2019.

6 Quoted in Schmidt, Doris: “Ein Gang durchs Kanzleramt und seinen Park”. In: Peter Sturm et al. (eds.): Kunst im Kanzleramt. Helmut Schmidt und die Künste, Munich 1982, pp. 68–81, esp. pp. 71–72.

7 Helmut Schmidt to Siegfried Lenz, 12.12.1968, Archiv Helmut Schmidt (Hamburg), HS Privat-Politisch—1968— A-Z, no. 47. See Magenau, Jörg: Schmidt—Lenz. Geschichte einer Freundschaft. Hamburg 2014, ill. p. 44, and Fulda, Bernhard: “Die Entstehung einer deutschen Nachkriegslegende”. In: Idem. et. al. (eds.): Emil Nolde. Eine Deutsche Legende, pp. 221244, esp. p. 238.

8 See e. g., Danker, Uwe: “‘Vorkämpfer des Deutschtums’ oder ‘entarteter Künstler’? Nachdenken über Emil Nolde in der NS-Zeit”. In: Demokratische Geschichte 14 (2001), pp. 149–188; Van Dyke, James A.: “Something New on Nolde, National Socialism, and the SS”. In: Kunstchronik 65/5 (2012), pp. 265–270; Kracht, Isgard: “Ansichten eines Unpolitischen? Emil Noldes Verhältnis zum Nationalsozialismus”. In: Stiftung Moritzburg—Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt (eds): Emil Nolde. Farben heiß und heilig. Halle 2013, pp. 193–198.

9 Vergo, Peter: “Emil Nolde.

Myth and Reality”. In: Peter Vergo and Felicity Lunn (eds.). Emil Nolde. London 1995, pp. 38–65.

10 Illies, Florian: “Das liest die Kanzlerin. Politik hat Pause: Angela Merkel fährt in den Urlaub und packt ein Buch ein. Anmerkungen zu ihrer Lektüre”. In: Die Zeit, 31.7.2008.

11 Koldehoff, Stefan: “Noldes Bekenntnis”. In: Die Zeit, 10.10.2013.

12 Krämer, Felix: “Emil Nolde.

‘Dämon dieser Region’”. In: Idem. (ed.): Emil Nolde.

Retrospektive. Munich 2014, pp. 13–35, ill. p. 31. See also Fulda, Bernhard and Soika, Aya: “‘Deutscher bis ins tiefste Geheimnis seines Geblüts’.

Emil Nolde und die nationalsozialistische Diktatur”. In: Ibid., pp. 45–55.

13 Quoted in Fulda, Bernhard: “Noldes Antisemitismus”.

In: Fulda et. al.: Emil Nolde, pp. 97-114, esp. p. 109, 111.

14 Quoted in Müller-Neuhof, Jost: “Das Gunstwerk”. In: Der Tagesspiegel, 6.8.2019, p. 3.

15 Hickley, Catherine: “Stripping away lies to expose a painter’s Nazi past”. In: The New York Times, 10.4.2019.

16 Jens, Walter: Der Hundert­ jährige. Festvortrag zur Feier des 100. Geburtstages von Emil Nolde am 7. August 1967 in Seebüll. Flensburg 1967.

Excerpts published in: Fulda et. al.: Emil Nolde, doc. 103, pp. 274–276, esp. p. 274.

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Artists of National Socialism in Postwar Modern Art Wolfgang Brauneis

In 1963 two of the first publications about the art sphere under the Nazis appeared: Hildegard Brenner’s Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (The Art Policy of National Socialism) and Joseph Wulf ’s Die bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich (The Visual Arts in the Third Reich). Over ten years later, in the autumn of 1974, the first exhibition on art in the Nazi era was shown in the Frankfurter Kunst­verein. Kunst im 3. Reich. Dokumente der Unterwerfung (Art in the Third Reich. Documents of Submission) curated by Georg Bussmann, attracted many visitors, was the subject of countless reviews and became a political issue. But only a handful of the exhibition reviews mentioned the careers of artists who were successful both in the Nazi era and in the Federal German Republic, such as Arno Breker, Werner Peiner, or Paul Mathias Padua. Although these three artists were still alive and working at that time, this aspect played no explicit role either during the exhibition in Frankfurt or later in the numerous presentations and publications on Nazi art during the 2010s. It is true that individual monographic texts and essays which trace the artists’ careers after 1945 are available, and a rela­ tively small number of texts on the topic can be found in essay collections.1 But to date there has been no exhibition or broadly based scholarly art study devoted to the careers, works, and reception of eminent artists from the Nazi period in the Federal Republic of Ger­ many. Even though such artists were only represented to a limited extent in museums and public art galleries in the 1950s and 1960s, at the time when the afore­ mentioned books by Brenner and Wulf were published

many of their works made since 1945 could be found in public spaces, town halls, and theatres or in the lobbies of insurance companies and post offices.2 A suitable starting point for an initial overview exhibition on this complex of topics is the so-called Divinely Gifted list compiled by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in the summer of 1944. It consisted of over 1,000 creative artists who were to be exempted from military service at the front because of their outstanding significance for the Nazi regime.3 They included 114 visual artists, every single one of them male. They were all members of the Reich Chamber of Culture and received public commissions. Their works were found in the collections of top-ranking Nazi Party func­ tionaries, they regularly participated in the Große Deut­ sche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich, and were the subject of portraits in relevant publications and the magazine Die Kunst im Dritten Reich (Art in the Third Reich). The list may not be accurate down to the last detail, and there may be some surprises such as sup­ posedly moderate representatives like the animal sculp­ tor Philipp Hart or the painter Ludwig von Hoffmann who was defamed as ‘degenerate’ in 1937, as well as the omission of one or two really prominent artists of the Nazi period like the sculptor Kurt Schmid-Ehmen or the painter Ivo Saliger. All the same, the list offers an official overview, in the true sense of the word, of the best-known protagonists in the Nazi art sphere. The description ‘divinely gifted’ already played an important role prior to the list—and featured particularly in Hitler’s speech at the opening of the Haus der Deut­ schen Kunst in 1937. It designates a nationalistic and anti-Semitic concept in art that was used against modernism in general and the related discursive practices, notably communication and criticism.

One of these ‘divinely gifted’ artists was Willy Meller, a highly respected sculptor during the Nazi dictatorship whose oeuvre included the overall sculp­ tural design of two Nazi educational centres for Party cadres, Krössinsee und Vogelsang. Meller received an award for his sculpture Deutsche Nike (1935), which still stands today on the grounds of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, and was commissioned to make the architectural sculpture for the Nazis’ KdF (Strength through Joy) propaganda project at the Baltic beach resort of Prora. Later, in the Federal Republic of Ger­ many, Meller realised numerous projects in public space in North Rhine-Westphalia and at various post offices in Bonn, Dortmund, Bochum, Lüdenscheid and Hagen. At the beginning of the 1950s he created the fed­ er­al eagle above Palais Schaumburg and the multi-part memorial in Frechen, Die Opfer (The Victims), in which— entirely typically for that period—the perpetrators and

The ‘Divinely Gifted’ in the Federal German Republic

The ‘Divinely Gifted’ in the Federal German Republic

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The ‘Divinely Gifted’ in the Federal German Republic

victims are barely distinguishable. Following that, in 1962 his monumental sculpture Trauernde (Female Mourner, 1962) was unveiled during the opening of the Memorial Hall commemorating the Nazi period in Oberhausen—and later became the theme of the ex­ hibition Risse im Stein (Cracks in the Stone) shown there in 2019.4 In Meller’s case, an initial monographic pub­ lication was produced as part of the evaluation of his artistic estate. But so far there is no scholarly reappraisal by art experts available on other ‘divinely gifted’ artists with quite remarkable postwar careers, such as Adolf Wamper or Hermann Kaspar.5 Wamper, whose figurative reliefs at the entrance to the Berlin Waldbühne concert bowl were also made for the Olympic Games in 1936, and who created one of the most striking monumental sculptures of the Nazi era, Genius des Sieges (Genius of Victory), headed the sculpture class at the Folkwang School in Essen from 1948 on, and realised over 30 works in public space after the war, most of them in North Rhine-Westphalia.

They included many works in Essen, such as the Markt­ brunnen (Market Fountain, 1955) and the Turnfest­denk­ mal (Gymnastics Festival Memorial, 1963), the colossal memorial in Gelsenkirchen for the pit disaster in the Dahlbusch colliery (1953) and Flammenengel (Flame Angel), the monument unveiled in 1962 to commemo­ rate the bombing of the city of Düren during the Second World War. Hermann Kaspar, in turn, received numerous commissions in Munich alone after 1945, like the large design on the façade of the city’s Cultural Office, mosaics for the Deutsche Museum, stained-glass win­ dows in churches and a tapestry for the meeting hall in the Bavarian parliament building. In earlier years he was not only entrusted with parts of the interior design of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and the design of the grounds for the Nuremberg Rallies, but also, together with Richard Knecht, another ‘divinely gifted’ artist, with the organisation of the procession for the Tag der Deutschen Kunst (Day of German Art) in Munich, an event of huge ideological importance.6 In the second half of the 1960s a Gobelin tapestry made by Kaspar for the recently built Meistersingerhalle in Nuremberg aroused a protest by creative artists in Nuremberg, triggered by an article by the literary and theatre critic Hans Bertram Bock. The resulting public debate and the publication of a critical pamphlet, Der Fall Hermann Kaspar (The Case of Hermann Kaspar), were both un­ pre­cedented.

Textual productions are particularly important in the investigation of this complex of topics. This applies just as much to publications by art historians and the artists themselves as to articles in illustrated magazines and newspapers, speeches at exhibition and memorial

openings and monographs about ‘divinely gifted’ artists which express untiring admiration for the renunciation of ‘fads’ and ‘isms’ and proclaim a transcendental under­standing of art unrelated to the present. The reader-response criticism may reinforce the impression of a basic anti-modernist attitude which already appears in the choice of iconographic details—whether it is Pallas Athene instrumentalised in Nazism as a place­ holder for a ‘pure’ type of art, or pictorial themes such as sowing, clearing woodland, the ancient world and the Occident—or the insistence on the supratemporal significance of Classicism, as it were.8 Yet this clearly involves more than just a specific dark side of postwar modernism in the Federal Republic. The cautious approach to the design vocabulary of modernism which, for its part, was often presented in the canonised exhibition practice of the 1950s only in a watered-down and piecemeal form, helped the ‘divinely gifted’ to produce artworks in public space, receive commissions from industry and business, and hold professorships and receive awards—in other words, to pursue their fulltime profession as visual artists without having to justify themselves to an (art)-critical public or even submit to a fundamental review of their work.

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For example, in relation to Arno Breker, certainly the best-known artist of National Socialism, see Kier, Hiltrud: Architektur der 50er Jahre.

Bauten des Gerling-Konzerns in Köln. Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig 1994; Trimborn, Jürgen: Arno Breker. Der Künstler und die Macht. Berlin 2011; Gillen, Eckhart: Arno Breker. Dekorateur der Macht und Sündenbock der Deutschen. Berlin 2015. To mention both an early example of relevant essay collections, and a relatively recent one: Bushart, Magdalena et al. (eds.): Entmachtung der Kunst.

Architektur, Bildhauerei und ihre Institutionalisierung 1920 bis 1960. Berlin 1985; Fuhrmeister, Christian et al. (eds.): vermacht. verfallen. verdrängt. Kunst und Nationalsozialismus. Petersberg 2017.

Also in 2017, Wolfgang Ruppert organised a conference at Berlin University of Fine Arts: “NS-Kunst?” “Nachkriegskunst?”, which discussed the “continuity and ruptures in the biographies of artists from 1937 to 1955”.

2 Irith Dublon-Knebel’s dissertation from 1994, The Place of Nazi Art in German Cultural History, written in Hebrew, is still unpublished as far as I know and was only partially reworked into an English essay twelve years later: see idem.: “A Dual Life— The Fate of Nazi Painters and Sculptors, 1945–1990”. In: Moshe Zuckermann (ed.): Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte XXXIV. Geschichte und Bildende Kunst. Tel Aviv 2006, pp. 205–231.

3 The exhibition on the ‘divinely gifted’ artists in the Federal Republic, largely parallel to the exhibition on the political history of the documenta, will be shown in the Deutsches Historisches Museum from May 2021.

4 Almost at the same time as Risse im Stein, the special exhibition “Ihr trugt die Schande nicht …” Die frühe Erinnerung an den 20. Juli 1944 was shown in the German Resistance Memorial in Berlin.

It focused on the making and functionalism of the Monument to the Victims of 20 July 1944 which was unveiled at the memorial in 1953 and which was made by the sculptor Richard Scheibe, another ‘divinely gifted’ artist.

In the Shadow of the Cold War Abstract Art in France, Germany, and the US, 1945–1959 Sabine Eckmann

5 Purpus, Elke: Zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie.

Zur Auffindung und Bestandsbeschreibung eines Teilnachlasses des Kölner Künstlers Willy Meller. Cologne 2014.

The historian Bettina Oesl has written an initial biographical overview of Adolf Wamper, see idem.: “Der Bildhauer Adolf Wamper (1901–1977)”.

In: Rheinische Heimatpflege 2 (2013), pp. 125–142.

6 Cf. Schweizer, Stefan: “Unserer Weltanschauung sichtbaren Ausdruck geben”.

Nationalsozialistische Geschichtsbilder in den historischen Festzügen zum ‘Tag der Deutschen Kunst’.

Göttingen 2017.

7 Müller-Mehlis, Reinhard: Der Fall Hermann Kaspar. Eine Dokumentation. Munich 1966.

8 Also interesting in this context are works which were already made during the Nazi dictatorship but only came into public space in the Federal Republic, like Fritz Behn’s Stehende (1936), which is one of several sculptures by this ‘divinely gifted’ artist installed in Cologne’s Rheinpark since 1957; and Fritz Klimsch’s Olympia (1937), which was only purchased by the city of Gelsenkirchen in 1956.

The year 1959 was significant for art history. documenta II was held in Kassel, and this relatively small, war-­ damaged city witnessed the international triumph of American Abstract Expressionism. This had important consequences for the narrative of the political history of art. Influential later texts such as Eva Cockroft’s Abstract Expressionism. Weapon of the Cold War (1974) and Serge Guilbaut’s book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983) reconstructed and criticised cultural policy manoeuvres of government offices and art institutions, particularly the Museum of Modern Art and its department, the International Council of MoMA, revealing how American cultural hegemony in the Cold War had been mobilised internationally.

Yet Arnold Bode had actually conceived documenta II to demonstrate the primacy of a universal global language of abstraction. As director of documenta, Bode worked closely with the influential art historian and enthusiastic advocate of modern art, Werner Haftmann.

In terms of cultural policy, an important goal for both men was to focus on artistic internationalism as a main issue. This can be seen in a letter from the documenta curatorial team to Porter McCray, director of MoMA’s International Council, who was responsible for the selection of the American works of art: “Since it is … the wish and desire of the committee of documenta not to accentuate the various countries in their characteristics, but to call special attention to the multiplicity of inter­ national directions in art since World War II, the paint­ ings and sculptures will not be arranged according to nationalities.”1 This ambitious wish failed to become

In the Shadow of the Cold War

1

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In the Shadow of the Cold War

reality, however. It was unusual that Dorothy Miller and Frank O’Hara from MoMA organised the exhibition of art from the US, whereas most of documenta II bore the curatorial signature of Bode and Haftmann. The result was similarly unusual: the MoMA show was physically cut off from the art of the other countries, particularly Western Europe. Due to the large format of the American works and alleged communication problems between the German and American curators, the works from the US were shown separately, while the other works were exhibited together and not differentiated by their country of origin. This mode of installation certainly negated Bode and Haftmann’s international concept and, moreover, for a large section of German art critics it signalled the triumph of American over European art; most of them commented accordingly on the colossal presentation and the large format of the American artworks.2 For the first time since the Second World War, aside from the Biennales in Venice which were, of course, traditionally arranged by country, the Old and the New World seemed to be confronting each other as rivals in a European exhibition. At the same time, however, abstract art of the postwar period was instrumentalised in tune with the Cold War as an international, democratic tool of the West. Abstraction was presented as an expression of individual freedom and, in contrast to the Socialist Realism of Eastern Europe, as inherently anti-ideological.

It is generally accepted that after 1945 and into the 1950s similar languages of abstraction in art emerged throughout (Western) Europe and the United States. As part of a trend towards deliberate re­nun­cia­ tion of objectivity and abstracting from the model of nature, artists in these countries shifted their primary focus to purely non-representational, non-figurative art, and to materiality and process. They formulated new concepts for visualising a world whose historical and moral borders had been radically transformed by war, systematic mass murder and the unfathomable destruction of cultural artefacts.

After the Second World War, from the late 1940s into the 1950s artistic exchange between Germany and France—despite the hostilities and rivalries in the prewar period—was a key factor for the art scene in both countries. For many people, modernism in West Germany—most particularly in relation to the realism of the Nazi past and that of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—carried connotations of recon­cilia­ tion and autonomy from politically motivated ideo­ logical dictates about art and successful re-education.

French intellectual and artists’ circles, still haunted by the spectre of past collaboration, pondered on what form the national image could take in the postwar era.

They demonstrated a conflicted position between the

possibility of reviving important past artistic traditions and a radical new start through forms of contemporary abstraction. At the same time American museums and galleries began supporting exhibitions abroad to draw attention to the growing importance of American art for the postwar period.

In the run-up to documenta II, private and official group shows with national and international orientation confirmed the importance of this international dia­ logue, which was multi-directional. Some of these ex­hi­ bi­tions tried to highlight a national cultural superiority by emphasising aesthetic quality, such as Advancing French Art (1951), American Vanguard Art for Paris (1951) and The New American Painting (1958); others pointed to diversity in the arts as a hallmark of demo­ cracy, like Amerikanische Malerei: Werden und Gegenwart (American Painting: The Future and the Present, 1951); and yet others concentrated on international contem­ po­rary dialogues, like Michel Tapié’s Véhémences Con­ frontées (Vehement Confrontations, 1951) which presented American and French artists, or the exhibition Lebendige Farbe—Couleur vivante (Vibrant Colour) in Wiesbaden in 1957, which brought together French and German abstract painters in one place. The number of these group exhibitions, and many solo shows, often curated by galleries, grew from the mid-1950s to the end of the decade. In contrast to the earlier exhibitions, which often presented a broader diversity of artistic practices and historical traditions, the later shows from around the mid-1950s onwards increasingly concentrated on abstraction and very recent art. This dense network of contacts between France, Germany and the United States indicates a time of mutual openness and aesthetic curiosity that reached its peak at documenta II. The critical literature of the 1950s and early 1960s, including essays by John McCoubrey, Clement Greenberg, and even Werner Haftmann, claimed that despite formal similarities the artworks were actually very different.3 Haftmann who, like Greenberg, was an advocate of autonomous and apolitical art, looked at mutually divergent national art-historical trends and argued that there were parallel yet nonetheless inde­ pen­d ent artistic developments in Europe and the United States. However, both McCoubrey and Greenberg situated American art in the context of the American exceptionalism motivated by the Cold War, in order to assign Abstract Expressionism a privileged, superior status. It is less well known that contemporary Ameri­ can artists like Robert Motherwell disagreed with such national(istic) ways of thinking.4 Admittedly, Greenberg and McCoubrey were far more influential. Over 60 years after Greenberg’s influential essay American-Type Painting, for example, the Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in

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than being, a latent temporality that anticipates the future.8 By contrast, the German artist Karl Otto Götz used a completely different method to indicate time as a means of producing paintings. In works such as 8.2.1957 Fodat (1957) he promulgated a very rapid painting process with the aid of a broad paintbrush and a squeegee. He prepared the horizontally placed canvas with glue and then vigorously applied paint onto it. The procedure took just a few seconds. Then he used a spatula to rip up the paint layers and partly remove them again—resulting in an interplay of positive and negative forms. Because the gestures are hardly distinguishable the result hovers between form and dissolution of form. In contrast to Pollock’s work, the viewer follows the trail of violent movements in a staccato style. The key feature, a vigorous rhythm, is achieved using a combination of controlled chance (Götz measured the time taken to make a brushstroke) and spontaneous gestures. Ultimately Götz created ambivalent structures in alternating swings of dark and light, positive and negative forms that intermingle speed with the nonlinear tempo of the rhythm.

Speed was also a topic of interest for the French performance painter Georges Mathieu. In his artworks such as Peinture (1952), an early purchase of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was exhibited there between 1953 and 1954 in the show Younger Euro­ pean Painters, we can discern brushstrokes thrown onto the canvas, energetically applied and graphically layered to signify an overall impression of brief, fleeting moments. According to Mathieu’s own understanding of time, nothingness is articulated through this. Unlike Götz and Pollock, Mathieu staged his performances in front of a vertically placed canvas and an audience, so that the performance itself became the central event.

An essay by one of Mathieu’s French supporters and colleagues, Michel Tapié, which appeared in the Ameri­ can magazine Art News in 1955, described Mathieu’s performance as a battle. Tapié wrote that vehement movements and intense abstract forms create the effect of “breathless progression”.9 The rapid, stormy exe­ cution was designed to demonstrate how, under the influence of speed, Mathieu would become invisible as a subject. It was an intention he shared with Götz: vigorous movement was supposed to serve as a means to desubjectivise painting as a medium. Whereas Pollock’s elegant dancer’s movements were an expres­ sion of a latent temporality of becoming—a very Ameri­ can idea—both Götz and Mathieu used speed to make vigorous gestures so as to destroy any possible form of subjectivity.

It is clear, even leaving aside Mathieu’s frequently clumsy painting performances with their national

In the Shadow of the Cold War

2016–17 qualified expressive abstract painting as a national and inherently American artistic style.5 Haft­ mann’s motivation was, of course, also inspired by national political interests: his emphasis on the inter­ national context of a universal, autonomous lan­guage of art was intended as a denationalisation—and thus denazification—of German art. He understood abstrac­ tion as a political tool because it seemed to affirm individual freedom and was thus symbolically sig­nifi­ cant for the fledgling democracy in West Ger­many— in stark contrast to the realism dictated by the Nazis and the GDR. The discourse about Expressionism as a national German idiom that built a bridge between the modernism of the period before the Nazis took power, and postwar painting, has not yet been sufficiently discussed. The German-French artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) is occasionally regarded as the ‘Expressionist’ link between the avant­garde of the prewar and postwar periods. Competing concepts were advocated in France, on the other hand. Michel Tapié and Georges Mathieu saw French abstract painting as the internationalisation of French postwar painting achieved with Paris as its centre. Other theo­r ies, perhaps less well known today, such as that of Charles Estienne, distinguished the French painters from their American colleagues by pointing to a similar but nationally different artistic practice: whereas the French artists irregularly stained the canvas, the Americans dripped or poured the paint on it.6 How is this kind of national codification reflected in these visually similar paintings? Jackson Pollock’s paintings, like Number 1 (1949), a work that was al­ ready shown in France in 1952 and exhibited several times in Germany in 1958, is a meticulous, densely layered network of enamel and metallic paints that displays structural similarities to abstract drawings. A reconstruction of the painting’s production process untangles Pollock’s movements, which resemble a nervous dance based on an elegant, complex choreo­ graphy. His movements are flowing and dynamic. To echo Harold Rosenberg in his 1952 essay The American Action Painters, the marks on the canvas can be understood as a record of immediate experience.7 The painting is not carefully planned and composed but is the result of dynamic movements in an all-over process in which Pollock dripped and poured paint onto the horizontally placed canvas while dancing on and around it. The picture surface directly registers the tensions between random operations and creative impulses, the unconscious and artistic control. The loops, twists and turns of the paint have no volume or contours, no beginning or end—they concretise time as nonhistorical and simultaneous. All the same, the traces of Pollock’s actions suggest a state of becoming rather

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Seeing Better through documenta?

themes, that artistic practices invoke national contexts.

As shown here by the examples of Mathieu and Götz, artists in France and Germany had experienced the politicisation, suppression, and destruction of modern art under the Nazi dictatorship and tried to obliterate the human subject and, in so doing, to signpost the way to a new relationship to history and possible paths into the future. Abstract Expressionists in the United States, on the other hand, wanted to move towards radically new artistic principles, unburdened by the European past, to create the art of the future.

In many respects the discourse and the exhibition of abstract paintings during this period anticipated documenta II. Both reveal simultaneously conducted discussions that debated whether this new abstract art should be considered as having a national or an inter­ national character. Discourse about art frequently be­ came intermingled with the ideological co-optation through the Cold War. National and international interests combined interpretations of art and artistic practices with political goals. The United States’ intended political and cultural hegemony, and growing nationalistic sentiments in Europe in the late 1950s, played a major role in this process.

1

Letter from Rudolf Zwirner to Porter A. McCray, New York, 12.3.1959, The Museum of Modern Art Archive.

2 Cf. “Im Wolfspelz”. In: Der Spiegel, 29.7.1959, p. 50; Zimmermann, Rainer: “­documenta II, die monströse”.

In: Blätter für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Kultur, 8.8.1959, p. 17; Scheben, Brigitte: “documenta II—Monsterschau des Gegenstandslosen”. In: Panorama 8 (1959); “Documenta 2 eröffnet. Bedenk­ liche Politische Tendenzen der Veranstalter”. In: Deutsche Woche, 22.7.1959; Schulze Vellinghausen, Albert: “Olympia der Kunst. Zur documenta II— Kunst nach 1945”. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25.7.1959, p. 1.

3 Cf. Haftmann, Werner: “The Painting of the Present Day”.

In: Idem.: Painting in the Twentieth Century. New York 1965, pp. 325–335; Greenberg, Clement: “AmericanType Painting (1955)”. In: John O’Brian (ed.): Clement Greenberg. The Collected Essays

and Criticism, vol. 3. Chicago 1993, pp. 220–242; McCoubrey, John: American Tradition in Painting. Philadelphia 2000.

4 “Symposium: Is the French Avant Garde Overrated?”

In: Art Digest 27 (1953), pp. 12–13, 27.

5 Online at: www.royalacademy. org.uk/exhibition/abstractexpressionism (accessed 14.11.2019).

6 Cf. Guilbaut, Serge: “Disdain for the Stain. Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme”. In: Joan Marter (ed.): Abstract Expressionism. The Inter­na­tional Context. New Brunswick etc.

2007, pp. 29–50.

7 In: Art News 51 (1952), pp. 22-23, 48-50.

8 Cf. Slifkin, Robert: “The Tragic Image. Action Painting Refig­ ured”. In: Oxford Art Journal 2 (2011), pp. 227–246.

9 Tapié, Michel: “Mathieu Paints a Picture”. In: Art News 53/10 (1955), pp. 50–53.

Seeing Better through documenta?* The planning of documenta 5, and the attempt to glance beyond the Iron Curtain.

Pietro Rigolo

In November 1971, roughly six months before the opening of the fifth edition of documenta in Kassel, the French magazine Chroniques de l’art vivant published an exclusive interview with the exhibition’s artistic director, Harald Szeemann. The cover was also dedi­ cated to the eagerly anticipated show, and bore a striking juxtaposition: two black-and-white photo­ graphs of sculptures representing human figures. The one on the left is a sculpture of a female model by American artist John De Andrea, whose vinyl works were realized by creating rubber moulds of an actual person’s body. The one on the right, which seems to be placed closer to us in the white, empty background, is a clay sculpture from the Rent Collection Courtyard, part of an ensemble consisting of 114 lifesize clay statues and 108 found objects, depicting an evil landlord collecting rent from poor peasants with the help of merciless mercenaries. Realized in 1965 by anonymous students from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in China, led by instructor Wang Guanyi, it is considered one of the most impressive works produced during the Cultural Revolution, and is a celebrated example of Socialist Realist sculpture.

While on the magazine cover the Chinese soldier comes to the forefront, sticking his chest out, making a fist, and stepping aggressively towards the reader, the naked woman appears static in the background, modestly covered by a ridiculous editorial fig leaf.

In the actual exhibition, things turned out quite the opposite. The Rent Collection never made it to Kassel—none of the Socialist Realist artworks from

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(of the signifier), the reality of what is represented (of the signified), and the identity or non-identity of the representation and of what is represented. Socialist Realism would have fallen into the category of the reality of the representation, together with advertising, kitsch, comics, political propaganda, and examples of how a country represents itself (with flags, stamps, banknotes, monuments and such).

The Szeemann archive now at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles testifies to the efforts to bring art from the GDR, USSR and China to Kassel. In an initial letter of May 1971 to the Ministry of Culture in Moscow, Szeemann briefly outlines the history of the exhibition and the new thematic approach of documenta 5. He goes on to explain how the section dedicated to the reality of the representation would greatly benefit from examples of Socialist Realism, as well as of architectural planning. This is particularly interesting, as it shifts the focus to other art practices in the Soviet Union at that time. In particular, Szeemann was clearly thinking of Lev Nusberg, with whom he had been in correspondence for around a year or so.5 Nusberg was the founder, leader and main promoter of the kinetic movement group Dvizhenie, founded in 1962. The group had worked with important state commissions, as well as on a utopian plane, planning megastructures for the city of the future. Just days after the letter to the ministry in Moscow, Szeemann decided directly to invite Nusberg and his group to documenta 5, in the section dedicated to utopian planning.

The negotiations in the following six months proceeded slowly, between long silences and partial openings. Szeemann tried different approaches, like contacting Heinrich Böll, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972, for contacts to artists who were not officially recognized.6 Another key player was Klaus Gallwitz, then director of Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, who was working on a Socialist Realism show for his institution. He travelled to Moscow in October 1971, negotiated with the Ministry of Culture, and apparently returned with good news of general interest7 and with a list of 15 possible artworks to be loaned. He shared the list with Szeemann, and with Karl Ruhrberg, the then director of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, who was also planning a show on Socialist Realism. This led to a phone call by the Russian Ambassador in Bonn in November 1971, saying that Moscow had met Szeemann’s request to exhibit works of Soviet artists at the documenta.8 The section of the catalogue devoted to Socialist Realism is empty, with only one page stating that, despite two years’ effort to bring to Kassel classical examples of Socialist Realism from the 1920s–1940s, the Ministry of Culture cancelled Russian participation

Seeing Better through documenta?

China, the USSR or the GDR considered for inclusion were actually exhibited—whereas John De Andrea was awarded centre stage, and his A. Anderson & N. Murphy (1972), a nude sculpture of a male and a female model embracing each other on the floor, became one of the most-circulated images.

This occurred not only because of difficulties in navigating the socialist bureaucratic apparatuses in those countries, and because of their relative lack of interest in participating in such an event in the West, but also because of a radical restructuring of the concept of the exhibition, which is attributable to Szeemann himself. documenta 5 has been extensively analysed and historicised as a moment of rupture, both in terms of the history of documenta and of the history of curatorial practice. Until then, the exhibition had always been organised by a committee of experts, headed by the founder Arnold Bode, which would democratically decide on artists’ participation. For the first time with the fifth edition, an artistic director was selected.

Szeemann decided to work with a core team of col­ leagues, among whom Bazon Brock and Jean-Chris­ tophe Ammann were to play a fundamental role, and seventeen other freelance contributors, establishing a model that would become canonical for the exhibition.

The first proposal, of May 1970, written solely by Szeemann, postulated the abolishment of the ex­ hibition, transforming documenta into a 100-day event featuring performances and other participatory events.1 This project was quickly dismissed, in the first place by Szeemann himself, after the somewhat disastrous experience of mounting an exhibition based on those premises in the winter of 1970.2 The second concept, presented at a press con­ ference in March 1971, was amply discussed in the media and received extensive international coverage. It envisaged a radical change in the history of the ex­ hibition: for the first time, documenta was meant to be organized in a thematic fashion, bringing a substantial shift in the way large contemporary art exhibitions are conceived and discussed—the shift, as noted by Maria Bremer, from an artist- to a curator-based paradigm in the contemporary art field.3 If the first concept was highly influenced by the post-1968 climate, and advocated a merging of art and life, the second one, masterminded by Brock, was based on critical theory.

The exhibition intended to engage broadly with all aspects of visual production in the contemporary world, analysing the relationship between the constructed image and reality, and the constitution, through images, of a double-structured reality. The exhibits were clas­si­ fied into three categories that were clearly informed by semiotic thought: the reality of the representation

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Seeing Better through documenta?

without any explanation at the end of March. From internal correspondence we learn that the inter­ pretation for this cancellation in Kassel was that the Russian authorities could not accept Soviet art being shown side by side with political propaganda, ad­ver­ tising, and religious folk art. The timing of the exhi­bi­ tion was also not ideal, with sensitive negotiations underway for the Basic Treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (which would be signed in December 1972).

From the start, the contacts with China were more difficult. Szeemann first contacted the Chinese Embassy in Bern and was told the Rent Collection was a national treasure and could not possibly be moved. He then tried contacting the Chinese Embassy in Paris, asking permission for the production of moulds so that casts in resin could be made in Germany. He even wrote to Bayer in Leverkusen about this,9 but was eventually refused permission to make the moulds.

It is interesting that the contacts with the GDR were the last to be established, and that this seems to have been an idea of Karl-Fritz Heise, documenta’s managing director, rather than of Szeemann. Heise him­self first wrote to the GDR minister of culture, Klaus Gysi, with whom he had some tangential con­ nections, in November 1971, at a time when the Soviet and Chinese routes were not completely closed but were moving extremely slowly. Despite further at­ tempts in the following months, Heise never received a formal answer from the East, and this attempt also eventually failed.

While these conversations continued without yielding much that would be shown in Kassel, major shifts were occurring in terms of the exhibition’s thematic structure. Szeemann, who had never been interested in the convergence of critical theory and semiotics, started championing an opposite position, putting forward concepts such as ‘individual mythology’ and ‘self-representation’, which became the two sec­ tions he curated himself, together with a presentation of artists’ museums. These sections, originally peri­ pheral, ended up occupying strategic positions within the two venues, and completely shifted the under­ standing of the show. The object of analysis no longer seemed to be reality as an objective, external sociopolitical phenomenon, but as a subjective one, hinting at an idea of the artist that was dangerously close to romantic aesthetics, far from the public dimension of the art making expected at that time.10 This does not mean that documenta 5 became an exhibition completely oblivious of social and political matters, but on a conceptual level, Szeemann reintro­ duced a way to see the interaction between the aesthetic and the social and political fields that was much closer

to how he had always considered the issue: the idea that art can bring change only on a personal, individual level, and that social change itself can be generated only by such personal transformation.

Although the presentation of Socialist Realism at documenta ultimately failed to happen, throughout his career Szeemann kept dreaming about presenting The Rent Collection to a Western audience. This dream resurfaced in 1998, when, while working as the artistic director of the Venice Biennale, Szeemann made exten­ sive visits to China and proudly represented his exhi­bi­ tion as the first international showcase of that country’s new contemporary art. The Rent Collection became the focus of one of the frequently discussed artworks in that Biennale, Cai Guo-Qiang’s Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard.11 In a letter dated November 4, 1998, when first invited to take part in the exhibition, the artist mentions reading something on the internet about Szeemann’s fascination with the sculptures. Cai himself had tried unsuccessfully in the past to produce some resin copies of them, and to include them in an installation.12 From then on, the two joined forces to make it happen. In 1999, however, the task was almost as hard as it had been in 1972. At the beginning, when they were still thinking about the possibility of achieving a loan from China, or from Albania (Szeemann had found out that plaster casts of a 1967 copy had been sent that same year to Albania, and never returned), Cai’s intention was to “[not] to touch them; I think the best way will then be the realization of your dream that began in the 1970s: to exhibit these revolutionary artefacts in glory.”13 This rapidly proved impossible, and getting copies made in China was also out of the question. At that point, Ai Weiwei, who was showing at the same Biennale, came to the rescue: Long Xu Li, one of the students who had worked on the original ensemble, was a relative of his, and still working at the Sichuan Academy. Cai contacted him, and Long agreed to go to Venice for six weeks with ten assistants. In Venice, the team worked for a month in the Arsenale, in the large room assigned to Cai. At the opening, six sculptures were ready, 35 were almost completed, and 62 just begun as wire frames. For the first two weeks of the exhibition run, the space was still operative as a ceramic workshop; after that, visitors were confronted with all the tools and machinery, and the sculptures at different stages of completion and decay. Cai had intentionally chosen to use an unprocessed clay that immediately started to split and flake.

If Szeemann’s idea of bringing the Rent Collection to Kassel was embedded in 1972 in a discourse about representation and its different connotations on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, Cai’s appropriation

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of the sculptures (and of Szeemann’s dream to begin with) adopted a clearly contemporary, post-modernist approach to art making, and intentionally blurred any binary oppositions such as original or copy, craft or art, Western or Chinese, capitalist or communist. With no walls to jump and no curtains to peep through, contemporary art in the 1990s had become a global language, for a global audience and a global market.

1

“documenta V: 100 Tage Ereignis”. In: Informationen 1, no. 9 (May/June 1970).

2 Happening & Fluxus, which opened at the Kölnischer Kunstverein on 6.11.1970.

3 Bremer, Maria: Modes of Making Art History: Looking back at documenta 5 and documenta 6, no. 2 (2015).

Online at: www.stedelijk studies.com/journal/modesof-making-art-history/ (accessed 10.10.2019).

4 The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2011.M.30, box 302, folder 7.

5 The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2011.M.30, box 273, folder 2. The cor­respondence between Szeemann and Nusberg has been studied by Matteo Bertelé in his essay “Lev Nusberg to Harald Szeemann (1970–1976): Notes on Convergent Ambitions and Shared Practices.” In: The Getty Research Journal, no. 12, February 2020.

6 Nachtigäller, Roland, Scharf, Friedhelm, and Stengel, Karin (eds.): Wiedervorlage d5 : eine Befragung des Archivs zur Documenta 1971. OstfildernRuit 2001, p. 120.

The Short History of a Long Fascination Walter Grasskamp

8 Schirmer, Gisela: DDR und documenta: Kunst im deutsch-deutschen Widerspruch. Berlin 2005, pp. 52-57.

9 Szeemann to Iden, 27.10.1971.

The Getty Research Institute 2011.M.30, box 306, folder 19.

10 Bazon Brock ended up working only on the visitors’ school, a project that was seriously hampered by budget issues, whereas Klaus Honnef and Konrad Fischer curated another section focused on Conceptual Art and Light and Space.

11 The artist won the Golden Lion that same year at the Venice Biennale.

12 For the development of the Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard project, see The Getty Research Institute 2011.M.30, box 1077, folder 4, and Zi, Dao, Erickson, Britta, and Xiaochun, Liu, “The Rent Collection Courtyard controversy”. In: Wu Hung (ed.): Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. New York 2010, pp. 368-378.

13 Cai to Szeemann, 21.1.1999, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2011.M.30, box 1077, folder 4.

7 Peter Iden to Klaus Gallwitz, 15.11.1971. The Getty Research Institute 2011.M.30, box 306, folder 19.

Any doctoral student of art history today will naturally assume that exhibition installation photographs are available for reference. They can be seen in the books and catalogues which should occupy considerable shelf space in every respectable curator’s household. They are printed on postcards, posters, and in magazines such as the present one and, last but not least, they appear in PowerPoint presentations. It has become just as self-evident that important exhibitions of modern art are documented as a whole. Entire conferences are dedicated to them, such as the symposium Landmark Exhibitions in the Tate Modern ten years ago. Added to this are exhibition reconstructions which attempt to reproduce what legendary shows looked like in three dimensions, with as many of the originals as possible.

The 2012 reconstruction of the Cologne Sonderbund Exhibition of 1912 was an impressive example of this.

Given the abundance of this photo material, its ready accessibility and the prominence of the topic, it is easy to forget that the history of exhibitions is still a very young genre of art history. Even a generation ago it was still by no means self-evident. After all, it is only four decades ago since I first realised that this new development was opening up.

It happened in relation to the exhibition Vor 30 Jahren (Thirty Years Ago), which Wulf Herzogenrath showed in the Kölnischer Kunstverein in 1978 in honour of his predecessor, Toni Feldenkirchen. It was a reconstruction of the exhibition Deutsche Malerei und

Exhibition Photographs as a Time Machine

* Note: The title refers to the motto of documenta 5: ‘Seeing better through documenta 5 ’.

Exhibition Photographs as a Time Machine

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Exhibition Photographs as a Time Machine

Plastik der Gegenwart (Contemporary German Painting and Sculpture) that Feldenkirchen had organised in the Staatenhaus hall in Cologne in 1949. I was immediately fascinated by the idea of completely reconstructing an exhibition 30 years later, and I think nothing com­pa­ rable had ever been attempted before 1978. Herzogen­ rath, however, groaned about the difficulty of finding the originals shown in 1949 by artists who had died in the meantime or never had a career that led to museum purchases of their work. In some cases their descen­ dants were impossible to find and, even if they were located, they had not always preserved the work of their fathers or grandfathers. Herzogenrath consoled himself with his favourite maxim from the Cologne Dada group Stupid: “Art is the perseverance of the survivors.”

Among his sources were the press photographs that had survived since 1949; they were the first exhibition installation photographs that I was aware of seeing as such. They were crucial in inspiring me to understand the sociology of art not only as the history of museums but also as the history of exhibitions. This resulted in the plan in the run-up to documenta 7, which was scheduled for 1982, to devote an issue of the magazine Kunstforum International, of which I was then editor in chief, to the history of the documenta.

Meanwhile, in 1981 I was encouraged by an innovation in Kunstforum that occurred without my involvement: on the instigation of the curator Kasper König, the whole of the exhibition Westkunst (Western Art) was pro­fessionally photographed and published in its en­ tire­ty in the magazine—again, as far as I know, without any precedent. Kunstforum immediately adopted the idea for other exhibitions and it is now a hallmark of the magazine.

The autumn of 1981 found me in the documenta Archive in Kassel, preparing my retrospective of the documenta from 1955 to 1977. I arrived there expecting be able quickly to pick out and take away the best photos from a rich, pre-sorted stock. The plan failed. In those days the documenta Archive, competently run by Konrad Scheurmann but underfunded, still regarded itself as a kind of research library with catalogues and the records that had gathered over the years as informational material for the exhibition committees.

When I asked for exhibition photographs, Scheur­ mann opened a steel cabinet containing hundreds of photo prints, mostly unsorted, waiting to be identified, classified and dated. Some of them had not even been labelled on the back by the photographers. The two days I had set aside for my easy haul turned into two weeks. In any case, the flotsam and jetsam of six ex­hi­ bitions passing through my hands was an adventure, a trip through time. I have hardly ever had so much fun with art history research.

Incidentally, the big sculpture hall caused a lot of work for me. It is my favourite room, but any curator desiring to create a similarly splendid chaos today would defi­ni­ tely fail the expert examination. The huge dimension of the sculptures squeezed into the tight space and the density of the installation would be unthinkable nowa­ days. Although the first documenta only had 100,000 visitors, the space must have been a nightmare for the security guards, and not just because of the delicate positioning of the smaller sculptures.

Of the good dozen sculptors on show there I was familiar with only six of them back then. For the first time I encountered names such as Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick, and consulted reference books for Berto Lardera and Karl Hartung. I realised that catalogues may include illustrations of works not dis­ played in the exhibition. In other words, photos of exhi­ bi­tion installations are often the more reliable sources.

This applies to the most recent case reported in the documenta Archive’s newsletter, that in documenta 1 a painting by Hans Hartung was reproduced upside down in the catalogue but hung correctly on the wall in the exhibition.1 Back then I was particularly struck by the superb quality of many of the exhibition photos of the first three documentas. They were taken by a local photo­ grapher, Günther Becker, who also took the pictures in the sculpture hall—with a glass plate camera. I was holding vintage prints of high technical quality in my hands—without gloves, an archivist’s nightmare.

Arnold Bode evidently had the foresight to commission Becker to make a documentary tour of the exhibition.

Bode, an experienced trade fair designer, knew that his own achievement in designing the exhibition would only survive in such photographs. In fact, it is only the photos of an exhibition that give the curator historical status as an author.

Those photographs continued to preoccupy me long after the production of the 49th issue of Kunst­ forum on the documenta.2 For years I collected every­ thing I could find, including pictures from contemporary magazines and advertising brochures. My goal was one day to reconstruct a complete tour of the first docu­ menta—a goal I only came closer to years later when Walther König showed me a small leaflet for visitors in 1955 with the ground plan of the Fridericianum. Now, for the first time, I could compile a slide show of the exhibition photos, arranged as a guided tour through the rooms, from the entrance to the attic.

This slide show—a now-defunct form of cultural technology—was a regular time machine: From the entrance to the museum café, you could visit an exhi­bi­ tion you had missed for some reason—in my case, for example, the 1955 documenta because I was still in

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as I know, nobody has yet written. It would have to include the exhibition photos of Günther Becker and Hans Haacke as outstanding artistic and historical examples—and this is a fitting conclusion to my modest tribute to these two very different photographers.

Exhibition Photographs as a Time Machine

kindergarten then. For decades I travelled the country with my slide show lecture, which I gave nearly 40 times.

The last occasion was in the summer of 2012 in the run-up to dOCUMENTA (13), and by then it was quite difficult to rustle up two reliable carousel projectors.

The lecture was naturally pure historicism and fairly naive because it gave the impression of immediacy about an event that had long since become history— “as if you were really there”. But it is impossible to visit a historical exhibition as it actually happened, even if every room can be completely reconstructed. For by now we know far more about it than a historical visitor could have known. In other words, in the metho­do­ logical transition from historicism to hermeneutics we have to consider the historical distance between ourselves and an exhibition.

This distance became tangible for me through the difficulties involved in identifying many of the works.

At the same time a mistaken belief took hold, unnoticed, in my perception of the first documenta: I always had the feeling it had happened in black and white. For me, it had the charismatic impression of 1950s neorealist films by Alain Resnais or Roberto Rossellini. But the beautiful line from Wim Wenders’ film Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things), “Life is in colour but black and white is more realistic”, does not apply to art exhibitions, of course.

And so I catch myself thinking that if a time machine really existed I would not have liked to see the 1955 documenta in colour at all. This is how exhibition photos can shape our perception. Maybe, secretly, I was never really a modernist but preferred those sedate photos to the reality of an exhibition in which brightly coloured pictures in lurid styles competed screaming for the visitors’ attention.

The most attractive bribery offered by Günther Becker’s photos is, admittedly, that he took the pictures on a tour without visitors. This gives us the privilege of seeing the art exhibition unspoiled by other people walking around. Another photographer, Hans Hacke, gave the exactly opposite impression—on the same artistic level as Becker, incidentally, but with a reflex camera from the GDR, an Exacta. In 1959 Hacke explored the contemporary context of documenta II in encounters with pictures and visitors, and some of those photos are reproduced in the present magazine.

As a result we have photos from the early history of the documenta with and without visitors, offering a dual perspective to sociologists of art and historians.

Although it has become self-evident to refer to such photos today, there is still no standard work on exhi­ bition photographs as such. They cannot be regarded only as sources of art history because they have long since acquired their own generic history which, as far

1

Cf. Voss, Lena: “#39 Hans Hartung steht Kopf”. Online at: www.documenta-archiv. de/de/aktuell/docarts/1991/ 39-hans-hartung-steht-kopf (accessed 15.11.2019); Bode, Arnold et al. (eds.): documenta.

Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts.

Munich 1995.

2 Cf. Grasskamp, Walter (ed.): Mythos Documenta.

Ein Bilderbuch zur Kunst­ geschichte. In: Kunstforum, vol. 49 (1982).

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Looking Ahead to documenta 15

move to Kassel permanently and the rest of us will move in and out, like satellites. That’s actually a privilege, because for a practice like ours, that works a lot of times locally, has a different understanding of time, and does not hold to the notion of individual genius, we cannot pretend to know a lot of stuff, these two years are actually almost ideal. As artists, curators, researchers, all this stuff that we’ve gone through, that’s actually a very privileged position.

Farid Rakun in conversation with Julia Voss

Julia Voss The documenta is really different from other exhibitions in that sense; if you take the Venice Biennale, for example, you are informed more or less a little bit more than a year ahead and then you have to work on it. The documenta requires much more of being in the city—and it also gets much more public funding than any other biennial, I suppose?

I think Asian biennials, like Gwangju in South Korea or Singapore, are also publicly funded. And Oslo is very specific, as well: They only have one logo on their posters, only the city’s logo. What they are doing with that is another thing. But that is a privileged position, being funded top-down. That’s very different from the Ghetto Biennial in Haiti or Jakarta Biennial, which are more bottom-up. But it’s not binary either: There are also ways to combine these models. The public funds are not the only quality that defines biennials.

Looking Ahead to documenta 15

Farid Rakun

Julia Voss Farid, you belong to a collective of artists

called ruangrupa, which is going to curate the next documenta in Kassel. So far, you and your collective ruangrupa have participated in many Biennials in Asia, in South America and all over in Europe. The documenta wasn’t founded as a bien­ nial, but turned into something like a biennial: an event that happens not every two years, but every five years, and is taking place continuously in the same city. Do you see the documenta as one of the many biennials and if so, which of the biennials is the documenta most similar to?

I think nothing actually compares to it. We did the SONSBEEK exhibition in the Netherlands, which is irregular, but now they are trying to make it every four years. It was actually founded before the documenta, but then because of the irregularity they couldn’t make it like the documenta basically. For us, the documenta doesn’t compare to anything, not only because of its scale, but also because of its timeframe.

For example, we couldn’t afford to spend a long time in Arnhem for SONSBEEK, but in Kassel we are actually required by contract to be there. That makes all the difference.

Farid Rakun

Julia Voss According to the contract, how much time do you have to spend in Kassel? Did you move there permanently?

Julia Voss I find the distinction interesting: What is a top-down and what is a bottom-up exhibition?

This is one of our interests at ruangrupa anyway, because we do institutional practice—not only institutional critique—, how to institutionalise etc.

Top-down would be, for example, exhibitions that are initiated by the state or a public institution like a mu­ seum. They can work together, a lot of times, only when the funding is secure, they can go on with their mani­ festations. With the Ghetto Biennial in Haiti for example, a certain group of people thinks that they need a biennial. They want to jump on the wagon for different reasons; a lot of times, of course, tourism is a part of it, and income, of course—but the question is: for whom?

With Haiti of course it’s different, what kind of artists they can show, why they need a biennial in the middle of everything—I mean it’s burning right now. This type of urgency is different—and then also the parameters of success.

Farid Rakun

Julia Voss We

Farid Rakun We have to be on site at the latest from next year on. Not all of us, but two of our collective will then

are all intrigued to find out what you are going to do once you are in Kassel. You have already published a kind of manifesto of what you

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That’s a bit of a problematic concept. I come from an architecture background myself, where the concept of urban acupuncture is already known. In architecture, the term has been claimed, used, misused and abused, etc. How we understand it is actually really like acupuncture: When blood is not flowing properly, you insert one or more needles at the blood flow and the blood is going to run; so in the urban understanding, using it as a metaphor in the urban setting, it would be like certain nodes that you can activate in order for certain things to happen and to connect. In Kassel for example, the eastern part of the city is a bit like a question mark: What can we do with it? We are very interested in that kind of situation. Just to activate the eastern part would not work in itself, and it could be read in a different way: Why should we go there and after it has served our purpose it would be left for gentrification etc., but how do we connect that in order not only to use it as a target—but one way to go there could be to stage a series of real and sincere urban interventions.

Farid Rakun

example: in its 14 previous editions, the event/insti­ tution has not really contributed to our ecosystem. No Indonesian artists have been represented there, as a very stark example. Our issues or artistic arguments have not really been included, as a consequence. What can it do then by including us today? In short, to actively contribute to the present documenta, we hope to be able to decentralize histories through practising change constantly.

Julia Voss One last question: What is the signifi­ cance of history for a contemporary exhibition?

Farid Rakun Well, first of all I would say that it is multiple

histories. It is clear that my history is very different from what you are talking about. Your understanding of the documenta depends on the Second World War and the Cold War, even the current situation with rising populism and ultra-right-wing political groups. How that translates is very different. So, for us, this multi­ plicity of histories could be played out in something as important as documenta. Because if something, you know, claims of itself—or is being claimed—to be the most important, the biggest in the contemporary … situation—yeah, I’m avoiding the word ‘art’—, then it also needs to be able to be a platform for other histories to come in—not only visibly, visibility is another thing, but in parallel, talking on the same level, sitting at the same table. Of course, German history is very impor­ tant, but something as global as contemporary art can also be a space for this history, just as much as for other histories, let’s say. We understand documenta—and its histories—as resources. It is a brand, a company, a plat­ form of knowledge, an archive, a money cow for some, etc. This understanding then acts further and enables us to share these resources to other contexts where contemporary art prevails and needs those resources.

We ourselves could serve as a great, albeit not unique,

Looking Ahead to documenta 15

are planning, and one point is your plan to “acupuncture the city”. I would like to learn more about this.

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Historical Judgement Published by Deutsches Historisches Museum Unter den Linden 2 10117 Berlin www.dhm.de President Prof. Dr. Raphael Gross Editorial Staff Dr. Nike Thurn (Head) Ilka Linz Oliver Schweinoch Dr. Arnulf Scriba Gesa Trojan Dr. Thomas Weißbrich Dr. Sabine Witt Translation Karen Margolis, Stephen Locke Copy Editing Karen Margolis Design Stan Hema, Berlin Printing Königsdruck Service GmbH, Berlin © 2020 Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum and the authors

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