Joseph Heinrich Beuys was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy.
82 Facts About Joseph Beuys
2.
Joseph Beuys was a founder of a provocative art movement known as Fluxus and was a key figure in the development of Happenings.
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Joseph Beuys frequently held open public debates on a wide range of subjects, including political, environmental, social, and long-term cultural issues.
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Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany, on 12 May 1921, to Josef Jakob Beuys, a merchant, and Johanna Maria Margarete Beuys nee Hulsermann.
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Joseph Beuys attended primary school at the Katholische Volksschule and secondary school at the Staatliches Gymnasium Cleve.
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In 1936, Joseph 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.
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Joseph Beuys participated in the Nuremberg rally in September 1936.
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Joseph Beuys graduated from school in the spring of 1941, having successfully earned his Abitur.
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In 1942, Joseph Beuys was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units.
10.
On 16 March 1944, Joseph Beuys's plane crashed on the Crimean Front close to Znamianka, then Freiberg Krasnohvardiiske Raion.
11.
Records state that Joseph Beuys remained conscious, was recovered by a German search commando, and that there were no Tatars in the village at the time.
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Joseph Beuys received a gold Wound Badge for having been wounded in action over five times.
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Joseph Beuys returned to his parents who had moved to a suburb of Kleve.
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Joseph Beuys joined the Kleve Artists Association, which had been established by Brux and Lamers.
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On 1 April 1946, Joseph Beuys enrolled in the monumental sculpture program at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts.
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Joseph Beuys 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.
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Joseph Beuys finished his education in 1953, graduating at age 32 as master student from Matare's class.
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Joseph Beuys had a modest income from a number of craft-oriented commissions: a gravestone and several pieces of furniture.
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Joseph Beuys explored a range of unconventional materials and developed his artistic agenda, exploring metaphorical and symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems.
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In 1956, artistic self-doubt and material impoverishment led to a physical and psychological crisis, and Joseph Beuys entered a period of serious depression.
21.
Joseph Beuys recovered at the house of his most important early patrons, the van der Grinten brothers, in Kranenburg.
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In 1958, Joseph Beuys participated in an international competition for an Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial.
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Joseph Beuys's proposal did not win and his design was never realised.
24.
In 1958, Joseph Beuys began a cycle of drawings related to Joyce's Ulysses.
25.
In 1961, Joseph Beuys was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.
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Joseph Beuys entered wider public consciousness in 1964, when he participated in a festival at the Technical College Aachen which coincided with the 20th anniversary of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.
27.
Joseph Beuys created a performance or action which was interrupted by a group of students, one of whom attacked Joseph Beuys, punching him in the face.
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Joseph Beuys manifested his social philosophical ideas in abolishing entry requirements to his Dusseldorf class.
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The dismissal, which Joseph Beuys refused to accept, produced a wave of protests from students, artists and critics.
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Later in life, Joseph Beuys became a visiting professor at various institutions.
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Joseph Beuys attempted to apply philosophical concepts to his pedagogical practice.
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At the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, Joseph Beuys did not impose his artistic style or techniques on his students; in fact, he kept much of his work and exhibitions hidden from the classroom because he wanted his students to explore their own interests, ideas, and talents.
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Joseph Beuys's actions were somewhat contradictory: while he was extremely strict about certain aspects of classroom management and instruction, such as punctuality and the need for students to take draftsmanship classes, he encouraged his students to freely set their own artistic goals without having to prescribe to set curricula.
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Joseph Beuys advocated taking art outside of the boundaries of the system and opening it up to multiple possibilities, bringing creativity into all areas of life.
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Joseph Beuys had adopted shamanism not only as a presentation mode of his art but in his own life.
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Joseph Beuys saw his performance art as shamanistic and psychoanalytic to both educate and heal the general public.
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Joseph Beuys died of heart failure on 23 January 1986, in Dusseldorf.
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In 1962, Joseph Beuys befriended his Dusseldorf colleague Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus movement.
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Joseph Beuys's relationship with the legacy of Duchamp and the readymade is a central aspect of the controversy surrounding his practice.
40.
Joseph Beuys's face was covered in honey and gold leaf, and an iron slab was attached to his boot.
41.
For example, honey is the product of bees, and for Joseph Beuys, bees represented an ideal society of warmth and brotherhood.
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Joseph Beuys produced many such spectacular, ritualistic performances, and he developed a compelling persona whereby he took on a liminal, shamanistic role, as if to enable passage between different physical and spiritual states.
43.
Joseph Beuys positioned himself on the gallery floor wrapped entirely in a large felt blanket, and remained there for nine hours.
44.
Inside the blanket Joseph Beuys held a microphone into which he breathed, coughed, groaned, grumbled, whispered and whistled at irregular intervals, with the results amplified by a PA system as viewers observed from the doorway.
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Joseph Beuys thus asserts the emergence of such a voice as an event.
46.
Joseph Beuys performed Infiltration Homogen for Piano in Dusseldorf in 1966.
47.
In May 1974, Joseph Beuys flew to New York and was taken by ambulance to the site of the performance, a room in the Rene Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway.
48.
Joseph Beuys shared this room with a coyote for eight hours over three days.
49.
Joseph Beuys became entranced by the periphery of Europe as a dynamic counter in cultural and economic terms to Europe's centralisation, and this included linking Europe's energies North-South to Italy and East-West in the Eurasia concept, with special emphasis on Celtic traditions in landscape, poetry, and myths that define Eurasia.
50.
Joseph Beuys adopted and developed a Gestalt way to examine and work with both organic and inorganic substances and human social elements, following Leonardo, Loyola, Goethe, Steiner, Joyce, and many other artists, scientists and thinkers, working with all visible and invisible aspects comprising a totality of cultural, moral and ethical significance as much as practical or scientific value.
51.
Joseph Beuys considered Edinburgh with its Enlightenment history as a laboratory of inspirational ideas.
52.
Joseph Beuys collected gelatin representing crystalline stored energy of ideas that had been spread over the wall.
53.
Joseph Beuys immersed himself in water with reference to Christian traditions and baptism and symbolized revolutionary freedom from false preconceptions.
54.
Joseph Beuys put each piece in a tray and as the tray became full he held it above his head and convulsed, causing the gelatin to fall on him and the floor.
55.
Joseph Beuys stared into emptiness for over half an hour, fairly still in both performances.
56.
Joseph Beuys met there Tadeusz Kantor directing Lovelies and Dowdies and was at Marina Abramovic's first ever performance.
57.
In 1976, Joseph Beuys performed In Defence of the Innocent at the Demarco Gallery where he stood for the imprisoned gangster and sculptor Jimmy Boyle in a manner associating Boyle with the coyote.
58.
In 1980 Edinburgh Festival Joseph Beuys was at the FIU exhibition and performed Jimmy Boyle Days, and where he went on a hunger strike as a public protest and led with others in a legal action against the Scottish Justice system.
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Indebted to Romantic writers like Novalis and Schiller, Joseph Beuys was motivated by a belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident about the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change.
60.
Joseph Beuys announced that the stones should not be moved unless an oak tree was planted in a stone's new location.
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Joseph Beuys wanted to effect environmental and social change through this project.
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Joseph Beuys's continued commitment to the demystification and dis-institutionalization of the 'art world' was never more clear than it is here.
63.
Joseph Beuys made it clear that he regarded this song as a work of art, not the "pop" product it appears to be, which is apparent from the moment one views it.
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Yet by choosing the vehicle of popular music, Joseph Beuys showed commitment to his views and to engage a broad means to have them reach people.
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Amongst other things, Joseph Beuys founded the following political organisations: German Student Party, Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum, Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, and German Green Party Die Grunen.
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Joseph Beuys became a pacifist and a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons; he campaigned for environmental causes.
67.
Buchloh critiques Joseph Beuys for failing to acknowledge and engage with Nazism, the Holocaust, and their implications.
68.
Buchloh then criticizes Joseph Beuys for displaying an inability or reluctance to engage with the consequences of the work of Marcel Duchamp, in particular, a failure to acknowledge the framing function of the art institution and the inevitable dependence upon such institutions to create meaning for art objects.
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For Buchloh, rather than acknowledging the collective and contextual formation of meaning, Joseph Beuys instead tried to prescribe and control the meanings of his art, often through dubious esoteric or symbolic codings.
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Joseph Beuys's attention is given to dismantling a mythologized artistic persona and utopian rhetoric, which he regarded to be irresponsible and even proto-fascist.
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Some argue that the existence of such a project invalidates Buchloh's claim that Joseph Beuys retreated from engaging with the Nazi legacy, a point that Buchloh himself has acknowledged, although the charges of romanticism and self-mythologizing remain.
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Additionally, the counter-institution of the FIU or Free International University, initiated by Joseph Beuys, continues as a publishing concern and has active chapters in German cities including Hamburg, Munich, and Amorbach.
73.
Joseph Beuys participated for the first time in documenta in Kassel in 1964.
74.
In 1970, a large collection of Joseph Beuys's work formed under the artist's own aegis, the Stroher Collection, was installed in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, which remains the most important public collection of his work.
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Joseph Beuys exhibited and performed at each documenta Kassel, most notably with The Honeypump at the FIU Workplace in 1977 and with 7,000 Oaks in 1982.
76.
Joseph Beuys showed four times at the Edinburgh International Festival and represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1980.
77.
In 1980, Joseph Beuys took part in a meeting with Alberto Burri at the Rocca Paolina in Perugia, curated by Italo Tomassoni.
78.
In 1984, Joseph Beuys visited Japan and showed various works, including installations and performances, while holding discussions with students and giving lectures.
79.
Major art museums in Germany have Joseph Beuys works including Fond III at Landesmuseum Darmstadt, while Moechengladbach Museum has the Poor House Doors and much more.
80.
Joseph Beuys gave a large collection to the Solidarinosc Movement in Poland.
81.
Joseph Beuys' artworks have fluctuated in price in the years since his death, sometimes even failing to reach bid minimums.
82.
At auction, the top price paid for a Joseph Beuys work is $900,000 for a bronze sculpture titled Bett at Sotheby's New York in May 2008.