Transform the world! Poetry must be made by all!

July 8 – August 16, 1970
closed August 3, 1970

Transform the world! Poetry must be made by all! was scheduled to be on view at Kunstverein München from July 8 through August 16, 1970; it had to close early on August 3. The title derived from writings by Comte de Lautréamont and Karl Marx, respectively. Its focus was radical art and revolutionary politics.

The exhibition Transform the world! Poetry must be made by all! as taken over by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and combined Russian revolutionary art and Surrealism, as well as documents from the May 1968 protests in Paris. Reiner Kallhardt, director of the Kunstverein from 1970/71, had invited students of the Academy to take part in the exhibition. With their contribution, they raised urgent questions about the prevailing continuities after 1945, taking the case of Hermann Kaspar as their starting point, who, despite his previous position as a regime-affirming, commis- sioned artist of the Nazi-era, remained a professor at the Academy into the nineteen-seventies, and to demand more political as well as cultural participation. With partial support from the board of directors, and by threatening to cut all of the Kunstverein’s financial resources, the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Cultural Affairs brought about the early closure of the exhibition on August 3, 1970.

The photo on the bottom left shows the extraordinary members’ assembly called by the board of directors on September 15, 1970, in response to the controversy surrounding the exhibition, during which a motion of no confidence was held against the board of directors. Fifty-one members voted against, and 265 for an “objection to the election from autumn 1969,” forcing a new election of the executive board within six weeks. The Abendzeitung interpreted the result on September 17 by titling: “Kallhardt won on a hot night.