Joseph Beuys

Biography

On 26 November 1965 Joseph Beuys’s first solo exhibition in a private gallery opened at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Visitors watched the artist through the glass of the window. His head was covered in honey and gold leaf, an iron plate was tied to his boot, a dead hare lay in his arms, and Beuys carried it from drawing to drawing as if explaining what they showed. Three hours passed in this way. The action was called “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”.

He later recalled that the explanations were silent, and that the only sound breaking the silence was the clank of the iron sole on the stone floor.

Beuys was born on 12 May 1921 in Krefeld, the son of a merchant; soon afterwards the family moved to Kleve, an industrial town on the Lower Rhine near the Dutch border. At school he drew well, learned the piano and the cello, and was keen on the natural sciences and on Nordic history and mythology. By his own account, when the Nazis burned books in his school courtyard on 19 May 1933, he pulled Linnaeus’s “Systema Naturae” out of the fire. In 1936, like the great majority of German adolescents, he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and at fifteen he attended the party rally in Nuremberg. Around 1939 he worked part-time for a year or so at a circus, looking after the animals. In the spring of 1941 he passed his school-leaving examinations. He thought of medicine, but in his last school years became interested in sculpture, possibly after seeing photographs of works by Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

The war took four years. In 1941 Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe, trained as an aircraft radio operator in Posen (now Poznań) under Heinz Sielmann, whom he helped to make nature films after the war, and attended lectures on biology and zoology with him. From 1942 he served in the Crimea, and from 1943 he flew as rear gunner in a Ju 87 dive-bomber. On 16 March 1944 his plane crashed near the village of Freifeld (now Znamianka). Beuys later said that he had been found unconscious in the snow by nomadic Tatars, who smeared him with fat and wrapped him in felt to keep him warm. The records say otherwise: he remained conscious, he was picked up by a German search party, there were no Tatars in the village at the time, and he lay in hospital from 17 March to 7 April. But the story became the origin myth of his art and the first key to his felt and fat. Where fact ends and legend begins in his case is hard to decide, and he did nothing to make it easier. In August 1944 he was sent to the Western Front in a poorly trained parachute unit; he was wounded more than five times. On the day after Germany’s surrender he was taken prisoner in Cuxhaven, and he remained in a British camp until 5 August.

Back in Kleve, Beuys decided to become an artist on the advice of the sculptor Walter Brüx and the painter Hanns Lamers. On 1 April 1946 he entered the monumental sculpture course at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts; in 1947 he moved from the class of Joseph Enseling to that of Ewald Mataré, and in 1953 he graduated as Mataré’s master student. Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy was becoming the mainstay of his thinking. He lived frugally, on small craft commissions: a gravestone, furniture. He drew hares, elk and sheep in watercolour and lead pencil; in 1974, 327 drawings, mostly from the late 1940s and the 1950s, were gathered into the cycle “The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland”. In 1958 he entered the competition for an Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial, but his design was not chosen.

In 1961 Beuys was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy. His students included Jörg Immendorff, Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Katharina Sieverding. In 1962 he became friends with Nam June Paik and briefly joined Fluxus, though he soon parted ways with it in his views. In “The Chief” (Copenhagen, 1963; Berlin, 1964) he lay on the floor for nine hours wrapped in felt, with dead hares at either end. The “Fat Chair” appeared in 1964, and a piano covered in felt with two red crosses in 1966. For a festival in Aachen in 1964 he composed “Lebenslauf/Werklauf” (Life Course/Work Course), a deliberately fictionalised biography in which he called his own birth an “exhibition of a wound”. He opened his class to everyone who wished to join, and in 1972, when the academy refused 142 applicants, he and his students occupied its offices. In October he was dismissed; in 1978 a federal court ruled the dismissal unlawful. The phrase “Everyone is an artist”, borrowed from Novalis, became the basis of his idea of “social sculpture”: society as a single work to which everyone contributes. He founded the German Student Party (1967) and the Organisation for Direct Democracy through Referendum (1971), co-founded the Free International University with Heinrich Böll (1974), and in 1980 was among the founders of the Green Party.

In May 1974 Beuys flew to New York and, wrapped in felt, was taken on a stretcher by ambulance straight to the René Block Gallery on West Broadway. He spent three days in a room with a coyote. The action was called “I Like America and America Likes Me”. Then an ambulance took him to the airport, so that he never once set foot on American soil.

In 1979 the Guggenheim Museum in New York showed his retrospective, the only major one in his lifetime. The main collection of his work, the “Block Beuys”, has been in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt since 1970. At documenta in 1982 he piled 7,000 basalt stones in front of the Fridericianum in Kassel and announced that each could be taken away only if an oak was planted at its new site. Beuys died in Düsseldorf on 23 January 1986. The “7000 Oaks” action officially ended a year later.