Beuys, Joseph

Beuys, Joseph (1921–1986). German sculptor, draughtsman, Performance artist, and teacher, one of the leading figures in avant-garde art in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Yves Klein, he was highly influential in shifting emphasis from what an artist makes to his personality, actions, and opinions, and he succeeded in creating a kind of personal mythology. (As a Luftwaffe pilot he was shot down in the Crimea in 1943 and according to his own account, which has been doubted, he was looked after by nomadic Tartars who kept him warm with fat and felt—materials that came to figure prominently in his work. The hat that he habitually wore hid the head injuries he received in the crash.)

Beuys was born in Krefeld and spent most of his early life in or near Kleve. He had intended being a paediatrician, but because of the outbreak of the Second World War he went virtually straight from school into the German air force. During his service he was wounded five times and he ended the war as a prisoner. In 1946–51 he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, and in 1961 he was appointed professor of sculpture there. Characteristically his sculpture is made of junk material or rough, unworked wood. However, he probably became better known for performances, of which a famous example was How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). In this he walked around an exhibition in the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf, his face covered in honey and gold leaf, carrying in his arms a dead hare, to which he gave an explanation of various pictures. He described the performance as ‘A complex tableau about the problems of language, and about the problems of thought, of human consciousness and of the consciousness of animals'.

Beuys became a member of Fluxus, an international group of artists opposed to tradition and professionalism in the arts, and he was also active in politics, aligning himself with the Greens, the West German ecological party. His ‘presumptuous political dilettantism’ was condemned by several of his colleagues at the Academy and in 1972 he was dismissed from his professorship. The protests that followed included a strike by his students, and a settlement was eventually reached whereby he kept his title and his studio but his teaching contract was ended. From this point he devoted more and more of his time to public speaking and debate, the well-known personalities with whom he conferred including Andy Warhol and the Dalai Lama. Although he continued to make sculpture, he dismissed the art object as ‘a useless piece of merchandise whose only purpose is to provide the artist with an income'. This was in line with the ideas of Arte Povera, seeking to undermine the commercialization of the art world, but even the blackboards that he used in his lectures and demonstrations have been sold for hefty sums. By the end of his life he was an international celebrity and was regarded by his admirers as a kind of art guru. Edward Lucie-Smith writes that ‘Beuys's mission, as he saw it, was to offer society a form of moral, social, and psychological therapy, but not necessarily any form of visual stimulus’ (Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century, 1996). Writing a few years before the artist's death (in The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thinkers, 1983), Peter Fuller took a less charitable view: ‘Beuys's many vociferous proponents maintain that he is demonstrating that the whole process of living itself can be regarded as a creative act. In reality, however, Beuys may be little more than an adroit poseur who has successfully exploited the decadence of late modernist vanguardism to his own advantage.’