Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys , 1921-86, German artist, b. Krefeld; one of the most influential of postmodern artists. Drafted into the Luftwaffe during World War II, he was wounded several times and in 1943 was shot down over Crimea. Nearly frozen, he was found by Tatar nomads who saved his life by wrapping him in felt and fur—materials that he later often used in his work and that assumed iconic, life-affirming stature in it. He studied (1947-51) and later taught at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where he was (1961-72) professor of sculpture. A member of the neo- Dada group Fluxus during the early 1960s, Beuys pioneered certain ritualized latter-day happenings that he called Actions; they were among the first contemporary examples of performance art . Later in the 1960s he and his art turned toward left-wing politics; he was a founder (1967) of the German Students party and a Green party activist in the 1970s.

With his room-filling temporary constructions, Beuys also pioneered the movement that led to installation art. In his installations and other sculptural work Beuys included such elements as food, dead animals, wire, wood, cloth, automobiles, musical instruments, scraps of various materials, and many other likely and unlikely objects. In these unconventional, often obsessional, and sometimes disturbing pieces and in his many drawings and posters, Beuys rejected abstract art in favor of an aesthetic that relied heavily on his own experience and that elevated subject matter to utmost importance. Thematically, he was apt to touch on such issues as the environment, politics, and humanity's relationship with nature. Famous in the international art world by the 1970s, Beuys had an important impact on an emerging group of avant-garde artists, first in Europe and later in the United States.

Bibliography: See J. F. Moffitt, Occultism in Avant-Garde Art: The Case of Joseph Beuys (1988); H. Stackelhaus, Joseph Beuys (1991); A. Temkin and B. Rose, Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (1992).

Beuys, Joseph (b Krefeld, 12 May 1921; d Düsseldorf, 23 Jan. 1986). German sculptor, draughtsman, teacher, and Performance artist, regarded as one of the most influential figures in avant-garde art in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Yves Klein, he was a leading light 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.) After the war he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, 1946–51, and he became professor of sculpture there in 1961. He worked in various media, but is perhaps best known for his performances, of which the most famous was probably 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.’

In 1962 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 West German ecology party, the Greens. His ‘presumptuous political dilettantism’ eventually led to conflict with authority 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 studio but his teaching contract was ended. He devoted a good deal of his later career to public speaking and debate, and in 1982 he had a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Paris. By the end of his life he was an international celebrity and was regarded by his admirers as a kind of art guru. To many people, however, his work is pretentious or incomprehensible.