documenta III

Due to internal disagreements, the third documenta did not take place after four years as planned, but only after five - which was to become the standard from 1972 onwards. The artistic director was again Arnold Bode, his theoretically oriented advisor within the multi-member committees for painting and sculpture as well as for hand drawing was again Werner Haftmann.

With its adherence to the traditional art genres of painting, sculpture and graphic art and the continued predominance of abstract art, documenta 3 was once again less in tune with its time than the previous edition. In 1964, Pop Art was on the rise in the USA, Nouveau Réalisme in France, and a new avant-garde was emerging in Germany with Fluxus and Capitalist Realism. Action art, happenings, conceptual and process art were the sometimes radically innovative new genres.

The guiding principle of the “Museum of 100 Days”, as Bode called the documenta for the first time, was: “Art is what famous artists do” – which was probably intended to underpin the thesis of the autonomy of art. Thus, it was not so much specific trends or tendencies in contemporary art that were examined as individual artistic personalities. Although the Nouveaux Réalistes artists Arman, César, Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, for example, were certainly represented, they were presented in very different contexts in the exhibition rather than in context. Joseph Beuys was also represented at documenta for the first time – not as a Fluxus artist, of course, but in the “Hand Drawing” and “Aspects 64” sections, which were devoted to more recent art – including works by Ellsworth Kelly and Morris Louis with color field painting or Robert Rauschenberg as an early representative of American Pop Art (completely misunderstood by Haftmann at the time).

In total, documenta 3 was divided into five sections:
On the upper floor of the Alte Galerie (formerly Gemäldegalerie, later Neue Galerie), older representatives of modernism were presented in individual cabinets. On the lower floor was the “Hand Drawings” section, which was of particular importance, as was emphasized several times; however, the extremely elaborate form of presentation in display cases or multiple passe-partouts was sometimes irritating. The “generation series of 40 to 60-year-olds” (according to Werner Haftmann in the catalog vol. 1: Painting, Sculpture) was shown on the first floor of the Fridericianum and the younger generation on the second floor under “Aspects”. This also included an exhibition on kinetic art entitled “Light and Movement” on the second floor, for which Bode was solely responsible, with Harry Kramer, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Jean Tinguely, Günther Uecker and the ZERO group, among others, which, although not mentioned by Haftmann in the introductory text, was one of the most innovative and experimental moments of this documenta.

The section “Image and Sculpture in Space” was shown in parts of the Fridericianum and in the ruins of the Orangerie, which, as in 1959, was once again reserved for sculptures. In this area in particular, Arnold Bode’s sense for unconventional stagings once again came to the fore, helping individual works in particular to achieve a special aura. “[…] That is why we are now trying to create spaces and spatial references in which pictures and sculptures can unfold, in which they can increase and exude color and form, mood and radiance.”

The Three Wall Paintings for the Staircase in the Kunsthalle Basel (1956/57) by Sam Francis in a raised hexagonal wall construction or Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s monumental Three Paintings in Space (1963), created especially for the exhibition, which were installed in a rhythmic staggered arrangement diagonally under the corner and thus lent the room an almost sacred effect as “ceiling paintings”, were particularly spectacular. Emilio Vedova’s installation of paintings hung and placed at different angles to each other in a black-painted room probably came closest to the new genre of environment. In and above all in front of the ruins of the orangery, sculptures were shown in an architecture of white walls and translucent ceiling constructions - a modern extension to the destroyed Baroque architecture that created an idiosyncratic connection between interior and exterior space. According to Bode, an “environment of walls, niches, recesses and elevations with structured views and pools of water” was necessary for the presentation of contemporary sculpture, the sensitivity of which could be lost through “confrontation with plants, trees, grass and sky”.

With around 200,000 visitors and predominantly positive international press, documenta 3 was able to maintain and institutionalize its “defining power” (according to Justin Hoffmann in his essay on documenta 3) with regard to the presentation, documentation and reception of modern and contemporary art, despite a somewhat backward understanding of art.