1. documenta
   27 June – 6 October 1968
   International Exhibition

The fourth documenta, and the last for which Arnold Bode was chiefly responsible, was presented under the somewhat overly youthful-sounding slogan “The Youngest documenta Ever.” A considerably younger documenta advisory board was expected to bring the “International Exhibition” in Kassel into
closer harmony with the spirit of the times in 1968. Absent for the first time was Werner Haftmann, one of the forefathers of documenta. Will Grohmann left the board along with him, followed later by Werner Schmalenbach and Fritz Winters. Following the retrospective focus of the 1955 documenta and the attempt to pick up the thread of international developments in art four years later, the time had come for a fundamental reassessment of position after the third exhibition, at the latest. In the aftermath of several internal disputes, a twenty-six member team was chosen to render decisions on the selection of artists in keeping with ground-roots democratic principles—not from a safe historical distance that went hand in hand with a latently authoritarian art-historical assessment, as had always been the case before, but with a consistent focus on the contemporary, i.e., the four years that had passed since the last documenta. Many of the works presented were completed shortly before the exhibition or actually produced specifically for documenta—a trend that would continue. Now, in 1968, Pop art made its grand, though somewhat delayed, entrance in Kassel, along with Color Field painting, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Op Art, and Minimal Art. In an imposing presentation that extended over two stories in the staircase of the rotunda, James Rosenquist’s Fire Slide (1967) established its place in the visual memory of documenta 4. The slogan “size matters” was affirmed even in the titles of Roy Lichtenstein’s Big Modern Painting (1967), Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude No. 98 (1968), Robert Indiana’s The Great Love (1966) in the Main Hall of the Fridericianum, and Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Poolballs (1967) in the Galerie an der Schönen Aussicht. Robert Morris’s L-Shapes (1967), Sol LeWitt’s expansive 47 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1968), and the paintings by Barnett Newman (Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II, 1967) and Morris Lewis also impressed visitors
with imposing formats.

All in all, roughly one third of the entire exhibition was devoted to art from the U.S., as represented by fifty-one artists, a fact that earned documenta 4 the nickname “Americana.” In 1968, the year of student protests and anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, this triggered massive counterreactions—although the demonstrations in Kassel were relatively harmless compared with those that accompanied the Biennale in Venice that same year. Students waving red flags disrupted the opening addresses at Friedrichsplatz, and the morning press conference was effectively transformed into a Happening by a group of artists led by Wolf Vostell and Jörg Immendorf. Among other things, the activists protested the total absence of such contemporary currents as Fluxus, Happenings, and performance art at the official exhibition. And indeed, the omissions of documenta 4 with regard to the German art scene were glaring compared with the gaps in the presentation of U.S. art. While the conceptual art of a John Baldessari or a Joseph Kosuth was overlooked, as was performance art (Vito Acconci, Dan Graham), the most important exponents and movements in the fields of painting, sculpture, and environmental art were represented by Ed Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg, and George Segal. Although Joseph Beuys did present a spatial installation, the group of German artists selected for presentation, including Horst Antes, Joseph Albers, and Erwin Heerich, for example, was not particularly innovative. Important artists of the 1960s, including Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Imi Knoebel, and Blinky Palermo, were absent, not to mention Fluxus and Happenings. A number of names were missing from the list of women artists, among them Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Rebecca Horn. Four of the 149 artists presented were women: Jo Baer, Louise Nevelson, Marisol, and Bridget Riley.
Outdoors, documenta ventured for the first time onto the Karlswiese, which was used extensively—primarily for the presentation of more traditional, semiabstract sculptures. It was evidently still too early for Land art in 1968. One particularly memorable work featured there was Christo’s (Jeanne-Claude was not yet mentioned as coauthor at the time) spectacular 5600 Cubicmeter Package (1968), which introduced at least the rudiments of a new concept of sculpture. Following multiple failed attempts, the air-filled tube finally proved capable of standing upright and rose like a phallus to a respectable height of fifty-eight meters (thereby earning various fitting nicknames from the people of Kassel).

One novel work with a claim to social relevance was Bazon Brock’s Besucherschule (Visitors School), in which he aimed to make the changing references to reality in contemporary art comprehensible to a broad public. With his didactic, performancebased venture into art education, he exerted a lasting influence on the educational activities involved in subsequent documenta exhibitions.

Artistic Director
Arnold Bode (1900–1977)

Born in 1900 in Kassel, died in 1977 in Kassel

Awards (selection):