Wolf Vostell, the pioneering Fluxus and Pop Art artist, designed the book “Kunst der sechziger Jahre. Art of the Sixties” for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum’s legendary exhibition. Vostell used a flexible, embossed clear plastic cover, a curved plexiglass spine, and stainless steel bolts for binding. This industrial, unconventional construction echoes the spirit of 1960s art and the Fluxus movement’s challenge to traditional formats. The book features multiple paper stocks—styrofoam, brown wrapping paper, transparent slipsheets, and graph paper. Each artist’s portrait is printed on a transparency, layered over tipped-in color plates, creating a tactile, interactive experience. Vostell’s design blurs the line between catalog and artwork, making the book itself a collectible Pop Art artifact. It’s celebrated as a zeitgeist-defining tour-de-force of book design and production. The catalog includes works by major artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, and many others to be rediscovered, with essays, quotes, and a graphics section. The 150 works from the Ludwig Collection are shown on with tipped-in colour plates, together with black-and-white artist portraits.
Published by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of Cologne in 1969/1970, with multiple expanded editions later. We have the second edition. The binding consists of flexible clear plastic covers and a curved Perspex spine bound with metal screws. The dimensions are 31 x 24 cm (approximately 12.2 x 9.4 inches). Inside there are 27 polystyrene sheets containing an introductory text, 160 numbered plates and 10 sheets containing additional material. The texts in German and English are set on bleached synthetic material similar to styrofoam. The English translation and the artist images are on brown packing paper and the artist portraits are on transparent overlays.
We cleaned the inside of our copy, removing the dust that can accumulate on the spine. In the process, we rearranged the transparent first pages to make the book more appealing. All sheets and additional information pages are included and can be put back into the book’s title and back as intended by Wolf Vostell. We realise that this deviates from the concept of the artist and book designer, but we enjoyed doing it in the spirit of Fluxus.
