Kasper König, whose groundbreaking work as a curator, museum director and educator has had a lasting influence on the development of contemporary art for more than half a century, has died at the age of 80. His death was announced on Saturday by Skulptur Projekte Münster, the sculpture-focused exhibition he founded.
König was one of those remarkable personalities – rare in every field – who managed to land important new projects in new places again and again over decades.
In the 1960s, when he was in his mid-20s, he organized exhibitions with Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1977, he founded, with Klaus Bussmann, the Skulptur Projekte Münster, an exhibition of ambitious public artworks held every ten years in that German city. In 1987, he founded Portikus, a prestigious art gallery at Frankfurt’s Städelschule, where he soon became rector. And from 2000 to 2012, he was director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, cementing its reputation as a leading venue for daring art.
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The Sculpture Projects alone would have secured König a place in history. They were launched in response to public criticism of a kinetic sculpture by George Rickey that Münster had acquired. Many of the leading artists of the time created works throughout the city. König organized each edition together with various partners, and some of the resulting works shaped the careers of the participants.
Oldenburg installed three giant concrete billiard balls near a lake in 1977, Siah Armajani installed an attractive row of benches and a table in a garden at the University of Münster in 1987, and Nicole Eisenman installed a cheerfully irreverent fountain in a forest park in 2017. That same year, Pierre Huyghe transformed a disused ice rink into an otherworldly science-fiction setting by excavating the floor and building openings into the roof. About three dozen of the projects are still on permanent display today.
While many star curators make their name by focusing on a particular group of artists or a single art movement, Koenig had Catholic-influenced tastes and always seemed to be on the lookout for new people to include in his circle. “One of Kasper’s secrets, for which I have the greatest respect, is that he commits himself totally, totally to an artist when he thinks the artist is crucial,” said art historian Benjamin HD Buchloh ARTnews for a profile of König from 2017.
Rudolf König was born in 1943 in Mettingen, Germany, about 40 miles north of Münster, and took the name Kasper sometime in the early 1960s. Fascinated by contemporary art, he interned with art dealer Rudolf Zwirner (the father of David Zwirner), a major source of Pop Art and other rapidly emerging movements in Cologne. He then ventured to London, where he took courses at the Courtauld Institute of Art (he did not graduate) and worked for art dealer Robert Fraser.
By the mid-1960s, Koenig was in New York, although stories differ about the manner of his arrival. One says he jumped ship in the summer of 1965 during a stint in the merchant marine. Another says he delivered two Francis Picabia paintings to the city for Fraser in late 1964 and then decided to stay. In any case, he hit the ground running in his new base of operations. His hopes of working for dealer Dick Bellamy, who ran the Green Gallery, were dashed because the company had just closed, but he studied at the New School, assisted Oldenburg (to get a green card, he said), and became the New York representative of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
The version of events that concerns the work of Picabia is particularly poignant, as König’s inventiveness, irreverence, and free-thinking in his work might recall the spirit of that Dadaist. König would eventually become head of important institutions, the Städelschule and Ludwig, but his early ventures included running a short-lived experimental art space in Antwerp, Belgium, which ended with what he called a “palace revolt” by the artist Panamarenko (who took it over as his studio), and founding an avant-garde publishing house at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, a testing ground for conceptual art at the time. And even as email became the standard means of communication everywhere, he was notorious for his correspondence by postcard.
In his life, König was instrumental in developing major international art exhibitions designed to shape the zeitgeist and attract tourists to far-flung places. He advised Harald Szeemann on the legendary Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, directed the Skulptur Projekte Münster (the next edition is planned for 2027), and organized huge exhibitions such as “Westkunst,” a groundbreaking 1981 initiative with art critic Laszlo Glozer in a Cologne trading hall that sought to tell the story of European and American art since 1939 through some 800 works by 200 artists. König’s curatorial work also includes the tenth edition of Manifesta, the traveling European biennial, in 2014 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
König’s survivors include his brother Walther König, a respected publisher and seller of art books in Cologne, his son Leo König, a New York-based art dealer, and Johann König, a dealer with offices in Berlin, Vienna, London and Seoul. His third wife, the Berlin gallery owner Barbara Weiss, died in 2016.
When asked about his approach as a curator, König liked to quote the witty phrase by the Fluxus-affiliated artist Robert Fillious that art was too important to treat it with meaning. He was a prime example of the curator as catalyst, and his exhibitions testified to a deep and abiding trust in the artists, a persistent desire to let them try things out and play. “I don’t like art with a capital C when it becomes somehow pompous,” he once said.
