Joseph Beuys
Joseph Heinrich Beuys was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll,, Caroline Tisdall, Robert McDowell, and Enrico Wolleb, Beuys created the Free International University for Creativity & Interdisciplinary Research. Through his talks and performances, he also formed The Party for Animals and The Organisation for Direct Democracy. He was a member of a Dadaist art movement Fluxus and singularly inspirational in developing of Performance Art, called Kunst Aktionen, alongside Wiener Aktionismus that Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann termed Art Happenings.
According to his biographer Reinhard Ermen, he can be seen as the “ideal antagonist” of Andy Warhol..
Beuys was professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1961 until 1972. He was a founding member and life-long supporter of the German Green Party.
Biography
Childhood and early life in the Third Reich (1921–1941)
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany, on 12 May 1921, to Josef Jakob Beuys, a merchant, and Johanna Maria Margarete Beuys née Hülsermann. Soon after his birth, the family moved from Krefeld to Kleve, an industrial town in Germany's Lower Rhine region, close to the Dutch border. Beuys attended primary school at the Katholische Volksschule and secondary school at the Staatliches Gymnasium Cleve. While in school he developed skills in drawing and took lessons in piano and cello. Other interests included the natural sciences, as well as Nordic history and mythology. By his own account, when the Nazi Party staged their book-burning in Kleve on 19 May 1933 in his school courtyard, he salvaged the book Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus "... from that large, flaming pile".In 1936, Beuys was a member of the Hitler Youth; the organization at that time included a large majority of German children and adolescents, and later that year membership became compulsory. He participated in the Nuremberg rally in September 1936. He was 15 years old at the time.
Given his early interest in natural sciences, Beuys had considered a career in medical studies, but in his last years of school he became interested in pursuing a career in sculpture, possibly influenced by pictures of Wilhelm Lehmbruck's sculptures. In around 1939 he began working part-time at a circus, where his responsibilities included posturing and taking care of animals. He held the job for about a year. He graduated from school in the spring of 1941, having successfully earned his Abitur.
World War II (1941–1945)
Although he finally opted for a career in medicine, in 1941, Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe, and began training as an aircraft radio operator under the tutelage of Heinz Sielmann in Posen, Poland. They both attended lectures on biology and zoology at the University of Posen, at that time a Germanized university. During this time he began to consider pursuing a career as an artist.In 1942, Beuys was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units. From 1943 onward, he was deployed as rear-gunner in a Ju 87 "Stuka" dive-bomber, initially stationed in Königgrätz, later moving to the eastern Adriatic region. Drawings and sketches from this time have been preserved, and his characteristic style is evident in this early work.
On 16 March 1944, Beuys's plane crashed on the Crimean Front close to Znamianka, then Freiberg Krasnohvardiiske Raion. Drawing from this incident, Beuys fashioned the myth that he was rescued from the crash by nomadic Tatar tribesmen, who wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health:
"Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man's land between the Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them and often wandered off to sit with them. 'Du nix njemcky' they would say, 'du Tartar,' and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet, it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital. So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in – I always preferred free movement to safety belts... My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact – there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That's how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying 'Voda', then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat, and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in."
Records state that Beuys remained conscious, was recovered by a German search commando, and that there were no Tatars in the village at the time. Beuys was brought to a military hospital where he stayed for three weeks, from 17 March to 7 April. It is consistent with Beuys's work that his biography would have been subject to his own reinterpretation; this particular story has served as a powerful origin myth for Beuys's artistic identity, and has provided an initial interpretive key to his use of unconventional materials, amongst which felt and fat were central.
Despite prior injuries, he was deployed to the Western Front in August 1944, assigned to a poorly-equipped and trained paratrooper unit. He received a gold Wound Badge for having been wounded in action over five times. On the day after the German unconditional surrender, Beuys was taken prisoner in Cuxhaven and brought to a British internment camp from which he was released three months later, on 5 August. He returned to his parents who had moved to a suburb of Kleve.
Studies and beginnings (1945–1960)
After returning to Kleve, Beuys met local sculptor Walter Brüx and painter Hanns Lamers, who encouraged him to take up art as a full-time career. He joined the Kleve Artists Association, which had been established by Brüx and Lamers. On 1 April 1946, Beuys enrolled in the monumental sculpture program at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Initially he was assigned to the class of Joseph Enseling, who had a more traditional, representational focus, but he managed to change his mentor after three semesters, joining the small class of Ewald Mataré in 1947, who had rejoined the academy the previous year, after having been banned by the Nazis in 1939. The anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner became an increasingly important basis for Beuys's philosophy. In his view it is "...an approach that refers to reality in a direct and practical way, and that by comparison, all forms of epistemological discourse remain without direct relevance to current trends and movements." Reaffirming his interest in science, Beuys re-established contact with Heinz Sielmann, and assisted with a number of nature- and wildlife documentaries in the region between 1947 and 1949.In 1947 Beuys, along with other artists, founded the group 'Donnerstag-Gesellschaft'. The group organised discussions, exhibitions, events and concerts between 1947 and 1950 in Alfter Castle.
In 1951, Mataré accepted Beuys into his master class where he shared a studio with Erwin Heerich, that he kept until 1954, a year after graduation. Nobel laureate Günter Grass recollects Beuys's influence in Mataré's class as shaping "a Christian anthroposophic atmosphere". He read Joyce, impressed by the "Irish-mythological elements" in his works, the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schiller, and studied Galileo and Leonardo, whom he admired as examples of artists and scientists who are conscious of their position in society and who work accordingly. Early shows include participation in the Kleve Artists Association annual exhibition in Kleve's Villa Koekkoek, where Beuys showed aquarelles and sketches, a solo show at the home of and in Kranenburg as well as a show in the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal.
Beuys finished his education in 1953, graduating at age 32 as master student from Mataré's class. He had a modest income from a number of craft-oriented commissions: a gravestone and several pieces of furniture. Throughout the 1950s, Beuys struggled both financially and from the trauma of his wartime experiences. His output consisted of drawings and sculptural work. Beuys explored a range of unconventional materials and developed his artistic agenda, exploring metaphorical and symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems. Often difficult to interpret in themselves, his drawings constitute a speculative, contingent and hermetic exploration of the material world, myth and philosophy. In 1974, 327 drawings, the majority of which were made during the late 1940s and 1950s, were collected into a group entitled The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, and exhibited in Oxford, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Belfast.
In 1956, artistic self-doubt and material impoverishment led to a physical and psychological crisis, and Beuys entered a period of serious depression. He recovered at the house of his most important early patrons, the van der Grinten brothers, in Kranenburg. In 1958, Beuys participated in an international competition for an Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial. His proposal did not win and his design was never realised. In 1958, Beuys began a cycle of drawings related to Joyce's Ulysses. Completed in around 1961, the six exercise books of drawings would constitute, Beuys declared, an extension of Joyce's seminal novel. In 1959, Beuys married Eva Wurmbach. They had two children.