Joseph Beuys was a German avant-garde sculptor and performance artist whose works, characterized by unorthodox materials and ritualistic activity, stirred much controversy.
Background
Joseph Beuys was born on March 12, 1921, in Krefeld, a small city in northwest Germany. He was an only child, to the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys and his wife Johanna Maria Margarete Hulsermann. The two were a devout Catholic couple of the northern Rhine-Westphalian middle-class. Just months after Beuys's birth, the family moved south to the industrial town of Kleve. Beuys would later recall, in an unsubstantiated account, that when, in 1933, the recently formed National Socialist German Workers' Party (or Nazi Party) staged a book-burning rally at Kleve (Beuys would have been aged 12), he rescued from the flames Carolus Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) - one of history's most groundbreaking works of scientific literature. (In an ironic turn, Beuys was himself compelled by legal fiat to join the Hitler Youth movement by the time he was a teenager).
Education
During Beuys's early education at Kleve, his primary and secondary school instructors identified his predilection for drawing and music. In keeping with his interest in medicine, Beuys continued his studies in biology and zoology in the early 1940s. On resuming his civilian life in 1946, Beuys enrolled in the monumental sculpture program of the Staatliche Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Beuys responded well to the instruction of Ewald Matare, at that time a widely popular German painter and sculptor, whose work had once been proclaimed "degenerate" by the Nazis. After several years of distinguishing himself in this intimate class, Beuys was admitted, in 1951, to the more select master sculpture class of Matare (Beuys finally graduated two years later).
In addition to the arts, the young Beuys also demonstrated an aptitude in history, mythology, and the social and natural sciences. Although he finally opted for a career in medicine, Beuys's ambition proved short-lived when, in 1941, he voluntarily enrolled himself in the German air force, or Luftwaffe (allegedly to avoid the draft). While Beuys's military subscription was voluntary, he had no desire to see actual combat.
According to his own account of 1979, a pivotal event changed the course of Beuys's life in March of 1944, when his battle plane was shot down over the Crimean Front in the Ukraine. Beuys claims to have been promptly rescued by a nomadic tribe of Tartars, who apparently saved his life by greasing his bruised and battle-weary body with animal fat, before wrapping him entirely - so as to raise his temperature - in felt. The importance of ancient healing aids - in this case, fat and felt - for enriching and sustaining the human mind, body, and spirit, would come to play an important and highly visible role in much of Beuys's subsequent work as an artist.
It is notable that several eyewitness accounts are on record as contradicting Beuys's romantic and exotic parables; in addition, there were reportedly no Tartar tribesmen occupying the region of Beuys's alleged military plane crash. In any event, a mixture of fact and fiction would come to play a central role in Beuys's later art works. Indeed, Beuys's tale of heroic rescue by Tartars (whether or not true) served as something of a linchpin for his decision, in the immediate wake of World War II, to devote himself thereafter to art and avant-garde culture.
During his latter studies with Matare, Beuys shared a studio with Erwin Heerich, who would subsequently be celebrated as one of Germany's most important 20th century sculptors. Wilhelm Lehmbruck is also a significant influence on the artist. Beuys's major influences during these early years, however, were generally more remote, such as the work of Italian Renaissance painters; the scientific theories of Galileo; the writings of James Joyce; the writings of the German romantics - namely Goethe, Novalis, and Schiller - and the work of various others who Beuys admired for their generally mystical and universal qualities.
The 1950s would prove on the whole a difficult time for Beuys, in regard to both his personal life and his work. Haunted by wartime memories and constantly suffering financial hardship, he devoted the majority of his time to drawing - ultimately creating several thousand works over the course of the decade. Beuys was in pursuit of a new artistic language, one that might emerge from intense solitude and introspection. In keeping with this ambition, he restricted himself to three motifs: animals, the female figure, and landscape. Complementing this creative asceticism, Beuys turned his back on all media other than pencil, ink, and oil pigments. One example of the kind of work that emerged from this intense discipline was "Woman/Animal Skull" (1956 - 1957), a highly personal, experimental and arguably mystical abstraction.
By the early 1960s, Beuys was at work on a series of drawings based on James Joyce's epic novel, "Ulysses" (1918 - 1922). This project was conceived as an extension of the novel itself; indeed, according to Beuys, he created the drawings at Joyce's own request. The claim that a literary ghost could act as his personal muse is indicative of Beuys's fascination with a creative process issuing from somewhere between fact and fiction, and physical and metaphysical self constituency, with the result that the simplest gesture might ultimately bear the status of a profound artistic statement.
Thus following on the heels of a tumultuous early life, Beuys's first official validation arrived in 1961, when he was appointed Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Beuys made significant waves while occupying this post, first by abolishing all entry requirements, and associating with a group of experimental creatives at Dusseldorf, among them progressive video artist Nam June Paik, as well as others closely affiliated with the recently formed Fluxus Group.
These new associations would act as a direct influence on Beuys's first ventures in the realm of performance art, the resultant works of which have come to epitomize Beuys's aesthetic sensibility in the popular mind. Fluxus stressed the importance of applying oneself to an unusually broad range of media, including painting, drawing, performance, sound art, sculpture, video, collage, and poetry. In Beuys's case, his artistic practice covered four major areas: so-called traditional art (painting, drawing, sculpture installation); art performance; art theory and academic teaching; and political activism.
In 1964, while Beuys was in the middle of performing a work at the Technical College Aachen, a student suddenly punched him in the face, bloodying the artist and causing the event to come to an abrupt conclusion. The work would continue to resonate, however, when a photograph of Beuys, nose bloodied and arm raised like that of a prize fighter, began to circulate. Beuys seized the opportunity, creating a heroic account of his life in the form of a fictional curriculum vitae, thus effectively transforming the utterly quotidian turn of events into a newly fashioned, near-legendary persona.
Beuys held his first solo performance one year later at the Galerie Schmela, in Dresden. "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" opened on November 26, 1965, and ever since, countless Beuys enthusiasts have come to regard this particular work his signature performance piece. Like a morbid soothsayer, Beuys sat himself in a store window, clad in felt and cast iron foot piece; while cradling a furry rabbit carcass, he carried out, with metronomic precision, a series of ritualistic, abstruse gestures, as though the fate of the world hinged on the mysterious rhythms of this scrappy pulpit.
Other non-art, or found material that Beuys used in much of his sculpture and conceptual art was animal fat. Beuys used this organic material in both its liquid and solid states, the implicit potential for continual metamorphosis of the fat suggesting a great spiritual substance. By constructing art from something that was, fundamentally in and of itself, a life-sustaining material, Beuys spoke to people on both physically and psychologically visceral levels. This is evident in seminal works such as "Fat Corners" (1960) and "Fat Chair" (1964).
Much as Beuys had worked single-mindedly with drawing in the 1950s, he likewise steadily concentrated on manipulating felt throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, using it alternately as sculptural medium, sound insulator, and poetic metaphor. Works that epitomize this varied practice include "Homogenous Infiltration for Grand Piano" (1966), "Homogenous Infiltration for Cello" (1967), "The Pack" (1969), and "Felt Suit" (1970).
Never the docile academic or administrator, Beuys was eventually dismissed from his professorship at the Kunstakademie in 1972, indeed owing partly to his unorthodox practice of accepting anyone into his classroom. It was never that Beuys believed virtually anyone could qualify as an artist merely by attending art school; rather, Beuys simply maintained that anyone who wished to attend art school should have the right to do so, regardless of natural talent.
Following a long illness, Beuys succumbed to heart failure on January 23, 1986 in Dusseldorf, not far from his place of birth. The trees of "7000 Oaks" continued to be planted by others after Beuys's death, thus implying the artist's continued presence well after his own soma had assumed a place in the realm of the invisible. Beuys remains, to this day, one of the few artists whose life and work continually spark debate and a sense of mystery over what constitutes art's legitimate province, and what might constitute the true limits of human expression.
Late in life, Beuys founded many political organizations - especially following his 1972 dismissal from his professorship - such as the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1974, and the German Green Party in 1980. Beuys's art itself also gradually became more political, all the while continuing to be informed by his concept of "Social Sculpture."
Views
Beuys's insistence on the fundamentally democratic nature of human creativity suggested that every fully thinking and feeling person is, by definition, an artist, has left a widely influential and creative legacy since his death in 1986. Beuys believed that if one were, by default, an artist, then one might be an artist everywhere, or in every context in which one finds oneself - the art studio proper, the classroom, and the "street" offering equally advantageous circumstances for creative experience. His performance art pieces were mystical experiences often described as shamanistic in nature because of Beuys’ tendency to incorporate ritualized gestures and sounds. He wanted to give his art a role, he felt it needed a duty. In order to achieve such challenging goals, Beuys turned to shamanism.
Quotations:
"To form a social order as a plastic is mine and the job of the arts. Unless a person recognizes himself as the essence of self-determination, he is also able to shape the content of the world."
Membership
After Adolf’s government made the Hitler Youth membership mandatory, Beuys joined thousands of German children and adolescents at the time and became a part of this notorious group when he was fifteen years of age. In 1947, Beuys was a founder member of the group Donnerstag-Gesellschaf (Thursday Group). In 1978, he was made a member of the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin. He was also made a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, in 1980.
Interests
Beuys enjoyed reading as well, making books his primary choice of entertainment.
Philosophers & Thinkers
Goethe, Novalis, and Schiller
Artists
Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Andy Warhol
Connections
In 1959 Beuys married Eva Wurmbach. They had two children together, Wenzel, born in 1961, and Jessyka, born in 1964.