documenta 1
The first documenta took place from July 15 to September 18, 1955 in Kassel . It is considered the first large and comprehensive exhibition of modern art in West Germany after the end of the Second World War.
The initiator of the show was the Kassel art teacher and designer Arnold Bode . On the occasion of the Federal Horticultural Show and with financial means from the zone border funding , he managed to attract more than 130,000 visitors. The exhibition was therefore unexpectedly successful. It was conceived and prepared in an art group called Western Art of the 20th Century . Bode also brought in the Berlin art historian Werner Haftmann as an expert .
Place of issue
The exhibition venue was the Fridericianum in downtown Kassel, only a few hundred meters from the garden show grounds. The building, built at the end of the 18th century, is considered to be the first building designed as a museum on the European mainland and thus has a long tradition of exhibition. The Fridericianum had been badly damaged in the war and in 1955, at the time of the art show, was in a shell condition that formed the backdrop for the exhibition: bare concrete floors, exposed brick walls and surfaces made of Heraklith ("sauerkraut plates "). Windows were covered with white and black plastic sheeting and unsightly parts of the wall were concealed. This exhibition architecture, which in part arose out of sheer necessity, found positive echo years and decades later, reminding many visitors and chroniclers of the design of the Bauhaus or the Italian rationalism of the 1930s.
Artistic focus
The focus of the exhibition was less on “contemporary art” created after 1945. Rather, Bode wanted to bring visitors closer to the works of those artists who were ostracized under the name “ degenerate art ” in Germany during the Nazi era . Therefore, abstract art , especially abstract painting from the 1920s and 1930s, was the focus of the exhibition. The contemporary art of the Informel was not shown at this documenta, but was reserved for the follow-up exhibition, the II. Documenta in 1959 .
List of 148 participating artists
literature
- Exhibition catalog, documenta, art of the XX. century , Munich 1955, also reprinted by Prestel, Munich 1995.
- Westecker, Dieter, u. a. (Ed.): Documenta documents 1955–1968. Four international exhibitions of modern art - texts and photographs ; Wenderoth, Kassel 1972, ISBN 3-87013-007-5
- Kimpel, Harald; Stengel, Karin: documenta 1955. , Edition Temmen, Bremen 1995, ISBN 3-86108-514-3
- Grasskamp, Walter: documenta. Art of the XX. Century. International exhibition in the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. In: Bernd Klüser / Katharina Hegewisch (ed.): The art of the exhibition. Insel, Frankfurt a. M. 1991, pp. 115-125, ISBN 3-458-16203-8
- Cultural Office of the City of Kassel / documenta Archive (Ed.) / CIS GmbH (Prod.): Documenta 1–9. A focus on four decades of exhibition history 1955–1992 , CD-ROM; Hatje Cantz, Bad Hersfeld 1998, ISBN 3-8932-2934-5
- Wollenhaupt-Schmidt, Ulrike: documenta 1955. An exhibition in the field of tension between the debates about the art of the avant-garde 1945–1960. Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M./Berlin/Bern/New York / Paris / Vienna 1994, ISBN 978-3-631-47242-2
- Schieder, Martin: The documenta I (1955). In: Étienne François / Hagen Schulze (ed.) German places of memory. 3 vol., CH Beck, Munich 2001, vol. II, pp. 637-651.
documenta 1955 | II. Documenta 1959 | documenta III 1964 | 4th documenta 1968 | documenta 5 1972 | documenta 6 1977 | documenta 7 1982 | documenta 8 1987 | DOCUMENTA IX 1992 | documenta X 1997 | Documenta11 2002 | documenta 12 2007 | dOCUMENTA (13) 2012 | documenta 14 2017 | documenta 15 2022