d is for democracy? : documenta and the Politics of Abstraction between Aryanization and Americanization

Abstract

As part of a larger study on documenta as a Haunted Exhibition, my article proposes a revision of the historiography produced by and about the recurring large-scale exhibition, founded 1955 in Kassel. By rehabilitating a selection of the modern abstract art that was ostracized in the ‘Third Reich’ as ‘Jewish-Bolshevist’ degeneration, the early documenta editions contributed to the construction of a binary historiographic fairy tale of ‘good’ (i.e. democratic) abstraction vs. ‘bad’ (i.e. totalitarian) realism, which has often been discussed with regard to US-American cultural politics of reeducation in Germany. Taking a closer look at the biographies of documenta’s founding fathers and the ‘Germanic’ genealogies of their historiographic practices, however, I seek to complicate this success story of documenta as an arbiter of democracy, whose makers were claiming a radical break with the Nazi past. Highlighting the show’s continuities with German nationalism before, during and after the Nationalist Socialist regime, both on an ideological and a personal level, I will argue that documenta not only served as a ‘weapon of the Cold War’, but also as a washing machine for German (art) history, including the biographies of its historians and curators, who thus managed to distract attention from their former Nazi associations by deploying abstraction as a detergent, whose capacity for political resignification allowed for its recuperation by different ideological regimes. The article traces the continuous attempts by a network of nationalist documenta co-founders to brand abstraction as something specifically German before, during and after the NS and discusses how this part of modern art’s history in Germany was largely overwritten by the general perception of an ‘Americanization' of abstraction after World War II.