ABSTRACT
Documenta has been called the most important and most spectacular of international art events. With each succeeding Documenta, the enterprise assumes greater and greater significance as an arbiter of contemporary art styles and markets. Thus what began in the 1950s as an experiment within a particular local context has turned out to be a successful series that can claim, at the end of each installment, that it is to be continued. This could not have been foreseen at the outset. In 1955, the first Documenta had no index number. Hopes for continuity may have existed but were hardly justifiable in a ruined postwar town that, after long prospering in the middle of the German Reich, found itself cast by history into a provincial borderland.
