Willi Becker, the former authorized signatory of documenta 4 (1968) has died in Kassel at the age of 96. Born in 1926, Becker, who at the time was head of department at the Kassel Sparkasse, had taken over the office of authorised signatory on April 1, 1967 by resolution of the supervisory board of documenta GmbH and continued to hold it until the months after the end of the exhibition.

Becker remained closely associated with the management of the subsequent documenta 5 (1972). His work for documenta coincided with a tense period of testing new organisational and financing models. The change of generations was just as characteristic of this phase as the processes of institutionalisation.