Ian Wallace E-Book

Ian Wallace

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 103

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

   1955 fand die erste documenta in Kassel statt. Zunächst als einmalig konzipiert, ist sie zu einer heute alle fünf Jahre wiederkehrenden, grundlegenden Ausstellung und Reflexion zeitgenössischer Kunst geworden. In seinem Essay, 1987 an der University of British Columbia, Vancouver, als Vorlesung gehalten, beleuchtet Ian Wallace die erste documenta, die nach dem 2. Weltkrieg ebenjenen Künstlern ein Forum bieten wollte, die im Nationalsozialismus als  » entartet «  verfemt worden waren. Die erste documenta ist gleichermaßen Spiegel wie Protagonist des kulturellen und politischen Klimas der Nachkriegszeit und hat unter der Führung von Arnold Bode, mit Unterstützung Werner Haftmanns, wesentlich zum Siegeszug der Abstraktion beigetragen, der West-Deutschland den Anschluss an die europäische Moderne verschaffte.    Ian Wallace (*1943) ist Künstler. Er lebt in Vancouver und hat an der University of British Columbia sowie der Emily Carr University of Art and Design gelehrt.      Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch 

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº002: Ian Wallace

The First documenta, 1955 / Die erste documenta 1955dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

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Agentin, Mitglied der Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Philomena Mariani

Proofreading / Korrektorat: Sam Frank, Cordelia Marten

Translation / Übersetzung: Ralf Schauff

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© 2011 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel; Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Ian Wallace Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Fridericianum, September 1941 (detail / Detail), Photohaus C. Eberth, Waldkappel; Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel; p. / S. 2: © 2011 Succession Picasso/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Photo / Foto: Christiane Zschetzschingk/© documenta Archivdocumenta und Museum Fridericianum

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Emilio Vedova with two unknown visitors in front of Pablo Picasso’sGirl before a Mirror (1932) at the opening of the first documenta, 1955

Emilio Vedova mit zwei unbekannten Besuchern vor Pablo PicassosMädchen vor einem Spiegel(1932) am Eröffnungstag der ersten documenta, 1955

Ian Wallace

The First documenta,

1955 /

Die erste documenta

1955

Ian Wallace

The First documenta, 1955

A lecture presented on the occasion

of a symposium on early postwar art titled “The Triumph of Pessimism,” University of British Columbia, Department of Fine Arts, September 26, 1987

The documenta exhibitions of contemporary art held in Kassel, West Germany, are now well known. They are awaited and received with great expectation and occasional controversy. Having established a reputation for historical prognosis and the legitimization of the present, they have become a focal point for ideological as well as aesthetic discourse surrounding contemporary art. In the summer of 1987, Kassel hosted documenta 8. But the first documenta exhibition, held in Kassel in the summer of 1955, was not necessarily conceived as the beginning of a series. It was simply called “documenta: Art of the Twentieth Century,” and in that title lay the ambitions of the project. Occurring mid-year, mid-decade, mid-century, it positioned itself as a fulcrum between the past and the future. It consciously historicized contemporary art in the process of its development and, in doing so, influenced all such exhibitions since.1 But above all, the conception and execution of the first documenta crystallized Germany, specifically the decade of 1945 to 1955, during which the contestation for legitimization was fought and won, through the decade of 1955 to 1965, when abstract art was more or less paramount, after which the hegemony of abstraction broke down under the influence of American Pop art and more radical political tendencies.

The excitement and sense of urgency that inspired this first documenta was the recognition by certain individuals that the time was ripe for a definitive statement on a new situation for postwar German art. The exhibition was proposed in 1954, just after the main organizers, Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann, had seen the successful Venice Biennale of the summer of 1954, and after Haftmann’s first major survey of modern art, Painting in the Twentieth Century, which formed the outline for the first documenta project, was published in that same year.2 This historical opportunity came at a time when several threads of political as well as aesthetic tendencies needed a public presence, a public forum of judgment.

The foremost ambitions of this first documenta were stated by its organizers, specifically by Haftmann, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue: primarily, that it consolidate the return of modernism to Germany after its hiatus during the National Socialist regime between 1933 to 1945; and secondly, that it reintegrate German modernists, specifically abstractionists, into the mainstream of European cultural and political life in the postwar period. This was accomplished through an intensive rationalization of the expressive and redemptive powers of abstract art by virtue of its links with the language of the self, creative freedom, and internationalism. And a third, probably unplanned, consequence of this exhibition was the identification of abstract art as the design motif for the emerging consumer culture that pulled West German politics irreversibly into the orbit of Western capitalism during the 1950s.

It took the decade between 1945 and 1955 to prepare the ground for the return of modernism in Germany.3 There were many stages to this development, and the importance of documenta is not so much that it initiated this process but that it crystallized and consolidated it. The ideological thrust of such a history in these circumstances meant something much more than just a recuperation and celebration of the prewar tradition of German modernism in the context of broader international, or at least European, developments. It was part of a cultural rehabilitation process that was politically motivated and linked specifically with the alignment toward Western Europe that was pursued by Konrad Adenauer and the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), which formed the Bonn government with a decisive majority after 1953. Documenta was part of the recognition of national rootedness and the role of history and tradition in this process. This was its specific ideological role and the status of abstract art was at the center of it.

The reputation of the subsequent installations of documenta was based exclusively upon its summarizing of contemporary developments. But the initial documenta of 1955 performed a unique historical role. Unlike the exhibitions that followed, the first documenta attempted a systematic recuperation and accounting (but not necessarily a thorough one) of the history of modern art from 1905 to the 1950s, albeit from a decidedly German perspective, and, as I have already noted, from the perspective of Haftmann’s book, which more or less formed a ready-made outline for the documenta project. It was a historical construction aimed at rehabilitating modernist art, specifically abstract art and the Expressionist tradition, from the slur of “degeneracy” conferred by the Nazis when they presented it as “Entartete Kunst,” or “Degenerate Art,” in an exhibition of that title that toured German cities to record crowds in the period 1937 to 1938. The connection between modern art and “un-Germanness” remained as the problematic of antimodernism and the unresolved inheritance of Nazi cultural policies in the public sphere in Germany until well after the war. While the fascists had to systematically vilify modernism in their attempt to “regenerate” German culture in the form of a politically correct academic realism, the organizers of the first documenta had to reverse this history. They had to resituate the interrupted history of German modernism as the authentic history. Yet, still in the shadow of the denazification program and the failure of the concept of “collective guilt,” the documenta organizers could not name the enemy of modernism. It was merely suppressed as an absence, but one that nevertheless cast its shadow over everything that followed.4

To the little extent that Nazi cultural policies could be divorced from their political policies, the programmatic antimodernism of the Nazi regime remained as an underlying influence upon popular cultural attitudes toward the visual arts throughout the early postwar period. Antimodernism was defended as well by conservative, primarily religious, ideologues such as the influential Munich art critic Hans Sedlmayr, who, in his book of 1948 titled Art in Crisis: The Lost Center, argued that “the artistic abortions” of modernism reflected “symptoms of extreme degeneration.”5 Although the theme of spiritual loss and regeneration was shared by progressive critics, Sedlmayr’s language and attitude retain the virulent reactionary flavor of fascism, and it is no coincidence that The Lost Center was written from classroom lectures delivered in Vienna during 1941 to 1944. The mission of the documenta organizers to recuperate the history of prewar German modernism from “degeneracy” for new needs and interpretations as the authentic German culture of the postwar period has to be understood in the face of the prevailing attitude represented by Sedlmayr and others like him.

The relation of the present to history, then, was an uncanny paradox. The documenta organizers had to evoke a memory and suppress it at the same time. Moreover, although much of the Nazi art that performed an overt role in promoting political and militaristic propaganda was confiscated in the denazification campaign, there still remained many highly placed and competent artists who had won a position in the fascist cultural program for their allegorical public sculpture, and a countless number who had attained a reputation with harmless and very popular genre subjects. The modernist enterprise of the first documenta dictated that artists whom the Nazis had replaced the modernists with be excluded from the exhibition, and were thus condemned to a form of oblivion.

In addition to the conservatives and antimodernists in the Western zones, there was also another, even more problematic, factor coloring the relations to a reconstructed history attempted by the documenta organizers. This was the existence of a center-left socialist consensus that remained an important element of West German politics and cultural perspectives up to the early 1950s. This consensus generally supported what we might call an active antifascist recollection registered through forms of social realism and an emphasis upon political subjects. While granting a liberal attitude toward creative freedom, proponents of such interventionist forms of art accused the abstractionists of evading the necessity for political engagement and an active accounting for the past in postwar art.6 The fact that most of the important antifascist artists of the Weimar period, who were predominantly social realists—Käthe Kollwitz being the most important—were excluded from the historical panorama of the first documenta certainly lends credence to this charge. This consensus, though, by the time of documenta, was for the most part locked into an alliance with the Eastern bloc, and thus could be safely, but not legitimately, disregarded by the documenta committee, who were bent on consolidating a regenerated modernism from within the ideological direction of the Western alignment.

The earliest tentative steps to reexhibit the “degenerate” modernists occurred in Berlin immediately after the end of hostilities.7 As early as 1946, the Berlin gallery Gerd Rosen gave solo shows to abstractionists Ernst Wilhelm Nay and Karl Hartung. Socialist artists working in the figurative traditions such as Max Pechstein and Käthe Kollwitz were now featured in the museums. In 1947, the public in Berlin was reintroduced to the “Masters of the Bauhaus” and by 1949 European connections were reconfirmed in such exhibitions as “The French Masters of Today” shown in Berlin, which featured such previously slandered artists as Marc Chagall. Monographs and literature promoting abstract art began to appear in the late 1940s. German modernists who remained in Germany even though they were prohibited from exhibiting began to receive favorable attention after years of isolation. The most notable and vocal of these artists was Willi Baumeister, an abstractionist from Stuttgart who won prizes at the Venice Biennale of 1950 and at the Bienal de São Paulo of 1951.

Nevertheless, even in the early 1950s, the preeminence of modernism was by no means universally accepted. With the hardening of ideological positions during the onset of the Cold War, the liberal-democratic ideals of the period, generally identified as the “third way” or “the vital center,” had to be more vocal to have an effect.8 The legitimacy of modernism was the subject of a number of debates in this period, and this situation was not limited to Germany alone. It became a heated issue in the U.S. as well when the anticommunist crusade targeted the New York School, and such progressive museum people as Alfred H. Barr came to their defense.9 The identification of modernism with individualism and freedom of expression, and abstraction with internationalism, was a common language of legitimization for liberal factions in both the U.S. and Germany.