ABSTRACT
In 1978, Wulf Herzogenrath reconstructed an exhibition for the Kölnischer Kunstverein (the Cologne Art Association), that his predecessor Toni Feldenkirchen had organized thirty years earlier in the Cologne exhibition hall. The purpose of the 1949 exhibition, Deutsche Malerei und Plastik der Gegenwart (‘Contemporary German Painting and Sculpture’), had been to define anew, after the iconoclasm of the National Socialists, what would count as contemporary art in the young West Germany. The original plan to repeat such an overview every four years starting in 1949 never got off the ground. Had a second exhibition on German or even on international art been organized in Cologne in 1953, the Kassel exhibition, documenta, would probably never have come into being. This missed opportunity might have been one reason the exhibition was repeated thirty years later, but it was certainly not the only one. Nor was it a matter of reviewing the decisions then taken. It would have been futile to give in to the critics’ favourite game of figuring out which artists might then have been over-or under-represented. This is in any case a moot point because the speaker (or writer) who makes it wins the debate every time, and it would have been even more boring in this case, due to the historical home advantage.
