Hermann Raum, “Documenta Ltd. and Its Impacts on the Art Business,” translated by Iain Boyd Whyte, originally published as “Die Documenta-GmbH und ihre Wirkungen im Kunstbetrieb,” in Die bildende Kunst der BRD und Westberlins (Leipzig: VEB E. A. Seemann Verlag, 1977), 71–73; this translation and introduction first published in Art in Translation 5, no. 1 (March 2013): 137–143

doi:10.4324/9781003009979-139113

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Hermann Raum, “Documenta Ltd. and Its Impacts on the Art Business,” translated by Iain Boyd Whyte, originally published as “Die Documenta-GmbH und ihre Wirkungen im Kunstbetrieb,” in Die bildende Kunst der BRD und Westberlins (Leipzig: VEB E. A. Seemann Verlag, 1977), 71–73; this translation and introduction first published in Art in Translation 5, no. 1 (March 2013): 137–143

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ABSTRACT

Hermann Raum had a serious interest in art in the West, particularly in what he saw as the fate of the realist tradition and that of “engaged art” in the face of the dominance of abstraction in capitalist countries. The publication of Raum’s book was timely; it appeared in 1977, the year in which artists from the GDR took part for the first time and made a considerable impact at Documenta 6 in Kassel. In 1955, the year of the final dismemberment of Germany by the Paris Agreement, the “Oligarchy” put on the Documenta in Kassel, which was intended to serve the redefinition of twentieth-century art history into the developmental history of postwar abstractionism. The concept of the exhibition cemented the notion of a realistic art that was exhausted to the point of meaninglessness.