Rosetta Stone at Kassel

Over the revelry at the Venice Biennale fortnight ago hung the disconcerting possibility that even as this famed old exhibition displayed its own mediocrity and disorganization, a lesser-known art festival 400-odd miles to the north was preparing to put on a top-grade show. The newer exhibition is at Kassel, where the Brothers Grimm lived, located at the geographic heart of Germany, and it is called Dokumenta III.

Two previous Dokumentas, in 1955 and 1959, had shown what Teutonic seriousness could do to fuse, focus and interpret significant modern art trends. The new show, which will go on for 100 days, may be the most important European art exhibition of the decade.

Housed in the Graustarkian palace ruins of the pomp-crazed nobles of Hesse, Dokumenta III features 1,500 intelligently selected paintings, sculptures and drawings from 250 artists who are either the acknowledged masters or the exploratory frontiersmen of modern art. The shaping hand behind it and the earlier Dokumentas belongs to Professor Arnold Bode, 60, an erudite man with Napoleonic looks and energy who rules Kassel with scrupulous esthetic integrity. A jury of 15 members (four non-Germans, including Peter Selz from Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art) aided Bode in choosing the entries, but shunned awarding prizes. Qualitative excellence is the aim at Kassel, and the one fixed premise is unconditional internationalism. Says Bode: "Valid art must be supranational."

Dokumenta III ranges supranationally from Arp to Wols, from Braque to

Giacometti, from Cezanne to Soutine, from an early Picasso to the latest Henry Moore, on such a scale that no museum or private collection in the world can match it. An enormous black two-story hall houses a kind of cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Absurd Berlin Diary of Emilio Vedova, with collapsible hinged parts jagging out in a variety of Gothic shapes. Three Paintings in Space by Ernst Wilhelm Nay are obliquely suspended from the ceiling of an otherwise entirely empty hall.

What begins as a subliminal feeling at Kassel gradually forces its way to consciousness: the sense of a unifying modern vision and temper that link seemingly disparate and dissonant works of art. The bewildering array of influences and counterinfluences in contemporary art, from the School of Paris to the New York School, from abstract expressionism to symbolic African primitivism, from the revival of art nouveau to the revival of Dadaism, all seem to call for a Rosetta stone, a hieroglyphic key to release meaning from mystery. Dokumenta III comes close to being that Rosetta stone.

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