Documenta

Documenta. A large international exhibition of contemporary art held every four or five years since 1955 at Kassel, Germany. The first Documenta exhibition, the brainchild of Arnold Bode (1900–77), a teacher at the Kassel Academy, signified Germany's reacceptance of avant-garde art, which had been banned by the Nazis as degenerate. The second Documenta, in 1959, contained an American section that demonstrated the achievements of the New York School, and the fourth, in 1968, was dominated by American Colour Field Painting, Minimal art, and Pop art. Out of some 150 artists invited, 57 were from the USA and many of the works they exhibited were of huge size. Subsequent Documenta exhibitions have often been organized around a theme—for example ‘questioning reality’ in 1972 and ‘art and media’ in 1977. Edward Lucie-Smith writes that the exhibitions were begun ‘as a platform for the statement of the superiority of Western values over those of Communism. The location was significant, since Kassel had been somewhat isolated geographically by the division of Germany. The exhibitions, lavishly funded and extremely ambitious in scale, began as relatively conservative and conventional Modernist surveys. The first Documenta exhibition contained art from the entire twentieth century, starting with Aristide Maillol (born in 1861) and Paula Modersohn-Becker (who died in 1907). Gradually, however, the exhibitions came to focus on strictly contemporary art, and thus they increasingly set the agenda for the international avant-garde of the day. Their influence was probably at its height in the 1970s, when they were able to draw vast audiences’ (Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century, 1996).