Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys the German artist and teacher (1921-1986), one of the most influential figures in the art of the second half of the twentieth century. His sculptures, actions, drawings and lectures proposed an expanded conception of art as a force of social and spiritual transformation, and he became a central figure in the European avant-garde.

Youth, War and the Crucial Legend

Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 at Krefeld in Germany and grew up in a middle-class household. As a boy he was drawn to natural history and to the stories of the explorer and scientist, and he read widely in philosophy, science and art. His childhood notebooks and drawings already show an interest in botany, alchemy and the relation of humanity to the natural world.

He served in the Luftwaffe during the Second World War and was wounded in a crash in the Crimea in 1944. Beuys later told of being rescued by nomadic Tatars, who wrapped him in felt and fat to save his life. The story has been questioned by scholars, but it supplied the materials, felt and fat, that recur throughout his work as symbols of warmth and healing.

He was taken prisoner and released in 1945, and the experience of war and its aftermath shaped his conviction that art must contribute to a spiritual reconstruction of society. He studied at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art and became a teacher there in the 1950s.

Extended Concept of Art

Beuys advanced the idea of an expanded concept of art, by which he meant that every human being is an artist and that creative activity is not confined to the making of objects but extends to social and political life. He held that thought, speech and action can themselves be artistic material, and that art should intervene in the world.

He developed the notion of social sculpture, according to which the whole society is a work of art to be shaped by human participation. The artist's task is to catalyse this transformation, and the creation of a democratic and creative community becomes the aim of art. His lectures, debates and discussions were essential to this project.

He was among the founders of the German Student Party and of the Organisation for Direct Democracy, and he campaigned for environmental and political causes. His idea that everyone is an artist was not a claim about talent but about the capacity of each person to contribute to the shaping of the common life.

Materials, Actions and Objects

Beuys used a small number of materials throughout his work: felt, fat, copper, iron, honey, batteries, dead animals and found objects. These carried associations of warmth, energy, healing and transformation, and they were chosen for their symbolic and physical properties rather than for their beauty. His sculptures often appear fragile and ritualistic.

He is known above all for his actions, or performances, in which he used his own body and presence as the medium. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare he sat with his head covered in honey and gold leaf and cradled a dead hare, offering it an explanation of art. In I Like America and America Likes Me he spent several days in a New York gallery locked in a room with a live coyote.

These actions were not spectacles but ceremonies intended to effect a change in consciousness. Their imagery is dense with myth, shamanism and personal reference, and they demand the active participation of the viewer in constructing meaning. Beuys saw them as healing rituals for a wounded culture.

Teaching and Institutional Critique

Beuys taught at the Dusseldorf Academy from 1961 and became one of its most popular and controversial teachers. He admitted far more students than the number permitted, arguing that the academy should be open to all who wished to learn, and his classes became a centre of debate about art and society.

The conflict with the academy authorities led to his dismissal in 1972, and he responded by founding a free international university and continuing to teach outside official institutions. The episode dramatised his conviction that artistic education should be democratic and available without restriction, and it became a defining moment of his public career.

His political activity and his refusal to separate art from life made him a polarising figure, admired by many young artists and regarded with suspicion by others. Yet his critique of art's institutions, and his insistence that art could serve social ends, shaped a generation of artists who work in participatory, political and conceptual modes.

Influence and Legacy

Beuys's influence on contemporary art has been profound and enduring. His expansion of art into social practice, his use of performance and installation, and his concern with ecology and democracy anticipated many of the concerns of later artists, and his teaching and example have shaped whole schools of practice.

He was a prolific graphic artist and object-maker as well as an actionist, and his drawings, in which he explored the same themes of energy and transformation, form a substantial part of his legacy. Major retrospectives of his work have confirmed his standing as one of the decisive figures of the postwar period.

His vision of the artist as a healer and a political actor remains contested, and some critics question the romantic myths that surround him, yet it continues to inspire artists who wish their work to engage with the world. He died in Dusseldorf in 1986, and the legacy of his ideas has only grown since.

See also

• Social sculpture
• Fluxus
• Performance art
• Expanded concept of art