Sohm Archive

The Sohm Archive, domiciled in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart since 1981, far from being a mere »art collection,« is the comprehensive documentation of an entire era, comprising correspondence, photos, books, catalogues, magazines, films, videos, relics of artistic actions and object art. A compilation highly appreciated by researchers the world over, the Sohm Archive can be used by any and all, provided previous arrangements are made by telephone.

A resident of Markgröningen, a town outside Stuttgart, the dentist Hanns Sohm (1921-1999) collected authentic documents of a counter-culture now often referred to as »Neo-Dada,« which attained its broadest spectrum of activities in the 1960s and ’70s. As these were objects which no-one else bothered to keep, Sohm can be said to have preserved this culture almost single-handedly. Testimonies to inter-media phenomena such as the Beat scene, the Happening, Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, Concrete Poetry, the multi-media works of Dieter Roth, Zero, underground literature and artists’ books are as much a part of the archive as tokens of the crossing of boundaries from artistic activity to political action by such late Sixties protest movements as Situationism, the »Spur« group and »Subversive Aktion.«