From Basel and Frieze to Art Brussels and Artissima, art fairs nowadays are ten a penny, hosting time-weathered collectors and budding lovers in tents and museums all around the world, throughout the calendar year. 50 years ago, however, as the Western world recovered from the economic depression that accompanied the world wars, the idea of gathering the very best of the world’s art institutions to showcase their wares in one place was still a very novel one.
This didn’t stop Hein Stünke and Rudolf Zwirner, the two German gallerists who founded Art Cologne, the world’s first modern art fair, under the name of Kölner Kunstmarkt in 1967. Motivated by the radical ideas circulating in the era, and spurred on by Paris’ decreasing role as a dominant force in the modern art world, the pair set about securing a venue – the historic festival hall, the Gürzenich – and rounding up the very best of Germany’s art galleries and dealers to exhibit, hoping to revive West Germany’s flagging market in the process. The Kölner Kunstmarkt ’67 opened on the 15th of September, functioning principally as a trade fair for classic modern, post-war and contemporary art, and made history in the process. Within a year, a trail of imitators was born, and the art fair, modelled in the image of Stünke and Zwirner' original, became part and parcel of cultural consciousness.
Nowadays, Art Cologne plays host to more than 200 international galleries, and showcases media from painting, sculpture, photography and prints to installation, performance and moving image art, making its roster one of the most diverse the art world has to offer. Still, the fair's earliest renditions remain utterly compelling in their development of the archetype of the art fair – an organic, bustling nucleus at the centre of a progressive and ever-changing industry – showing a young Marina Abramović performing with Ulay in a bright, crowded room, or a bespectacled Damien Hirst next to his seminal work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, at the Saatchi Gallery's 1993 stand. These are the scenes on display in a new book detailing the fair’s storied history, launching next month in celebration of its 50th anniversary, and they make for viewing as fascinating as the works they depict.
Art Cologne runs from April 14 until April 17, 2016.
