Artists & Works

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO, TOTAL ART

Born in Northwestern Germany, Joseph Beuys studied both art and the natural sciences, and was pursuing a career in medicine when WWII broke out and he became a combat pilot and radio operator. Beuys was wounded several times, and after the war he began studying art exclusively, graduating and later becoming a full professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. In Düsseldorf, Beuys became exposed to the Fluxus movement and such artists as Nam June Paik, whose concepts became a catalyst for Beuys’ theory and practice of art-making.

Beuys rejected the idea of art consisting of particular and distinct genres such as painting, sculpture, and photography. Instead, he pursued an expanded definition of art in which the individual is always pursuing creative acts. This definition culminated in Beuys’ idea of “social sculpture.” Some of Beuys' most famous projects include the planting of 7,000 oaks, each with a basalt post (1982-1987); the exhibition of works made out of felt and fat; and performances in which he inhabited the exhibition space with a coyote. Beuys felt the contemporary artist could be a modern-day shaman, a healer of society’s wounds. His use of fat and felt is traced to a now legendary anecdote that after a wartime crash landing, he was nursed back to health by Tatar peasants, who wrapped him in fat and felt.

The print Beuys created for the Picasso portfolio is typical of his drawing style, which often contained wispy, fragmented images, doodle-like and influenced by such artists as Lautrec and Modigliani.

Biographical information from the Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press, 2003.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Robert Duffy, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8/7/94
"[Beuys’] drawings reveal not only the artist's originality but also, interestingly, his place in art's mainstream. There are stylistic connections to be made with artists such as Albrecht Duerer and Caspar David Friedrich, as well as with 20th-century artists such as Egon Schiele and Alberto Giacometti.
Many of the drawings are representationalist. Some of the figure drawings are naughty in a Toulouse-Lautrec sort of way; some are erotic; others look like drawings little boys make about war, where bullets zing across space and bombs fall out of the sky. Some are tender, such as a drawing on a pocket-calendar page of a sleeping swan. Others are agitated and complex and uncompromisingly serious. They appear to be transcriptions of thinking."