From roughly the 1950s through the early 1980s, Beuys demonstrated how art might originate in personal experience yet also address universal artistic, political, and/or social ideas (i.e. Joseph Beuys was the preeminent spokesperson of postwar European art and among the most radical artists of the century. Walker Art Center Menu. Joseph Beuys was a German-born artist active in Europe and the United States from the 1950s through the early 1980s, who came to be associated with that era's international, Conceptual art and Fluxus movements. The two were a devout Catholic couple of the northern Rhine-Westphalian middle-class. 1921-1986. Beuys worked at this time mostly in solitude, as though under a strenuous search for self-enlightenment, simultaneously seeking a new artistic language that would combine the spiritual and the physical, the solid and the fluid, the ephemeral and the permanent. He wanted to extend the creative process into every facet of life and employ art as an educational tool. May 10, 2010, By Talitha Kotze / Joseph Beuys’s project 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) began in 1982 at Documenta 7, the large international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.His plan called for the planting of 7,000 trees—each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high and positioned above ground—throughout the … When Joseph Beuys Locked Himself in a Room with a Live Coyote, Why Shamanic Practices Are Making a Comeback in Contemporary Art, Discover, buy, and sell art by the world’s leading artists, To download, scan this code with your phone’s camera. Beuys did not consider art to be separate from society, and he devoted the last twenty years of his life to both art and constant activism for socioeconomic reform (he was a founding member of Germany's Green Party). Thus I am all the more happy that we are able to make this great offer to our clients on occasion of the artist‘s 100th birthday“, says Robert Ketterer, auctioneer and owner of Ketterer Kunst. (Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas) In this action, Beuys represents Christ himself, giving a lecture on modesty and service instead of dominance. Yet it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. December 14, 2007, By Jonathan Jones / Deutsche Welle / Joseph Beuys' multiples on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art These works embodying the egalitarian nature of multiples have ironically been hidden from view until now The Art Newspaper Born into an era rife with political unrest, the German artist would not know a life free from war until his late twenties. This is part of the meaning to be gleaned from his 1965 solo performance. It was during this time that he began to seriously ponder a career as an artist. In this project of 1974, the artist is inspired by the belief that the union between men and nature must be restored. As though carrying out a strange music (if not some macabre bedtime story), Beuys frequently whispered things to the animal carcass about his own drawings hanging on the walls around him. View Joseph Beuys’s 9,407 artworks on artnet. [Why Joseph Beuys’s mysterious art continues to inspire—and incense.] Joseph Beuys was a talented German artist who produced exceptional works as a sculptor, graphic artist, art theorist, as well as being a passionate performance artist. The Guardian / As for most of his subsequent installations and performance work, Beuys had created a new visual syntax not only for himself, but for all conceptual art that might follow him. A major figure of the postwar German avant-garde, Joseph Beuys viewed art as a vehicle for social change. “Top quality pieces by Joseph Beuys are very rare on the current art market. Joseph Beuys was a leading German Conceptual and performance artist. topical issues of the day). Every item in the room - a wilting fir tree, the honey, the felt, and the fifty-dollars-worth of gold leaf - was chosen specifically for both its symbolic potential as well as its literal significance: honey for life, gold for wealth, hare as death, metal as conductor of invisible energies, felt as protection, and so forth. Through these basic organic compounds, viewers may well have imagined themselves occupying this chair, thus endowing Fat Chair with the status of a "proxy" for self-reflection on the transience of human life and the need to consciously and expeditiously channel one's own organic and-alas-ephemeral energies. Joseph Beuys (German: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs]; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue. April 15, 2010, By Carol Vogel / This is not the first project that Joseph Beuys has done to advocate for this end. In this performance piece, Beuys could be viewed - his head and face covered in honey and gold leaf - through a gallery's windows, a slab of iron tied to one boot, a felt pad to the other, as the artist cradled a dead hare. April 3, 2002. TheArtStory.org Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors Available from: First published on 01 Dec 2010. His performance art "actions" were shamanistic experiences incorporating ritualized movement and sound, as well as non-traditional and even repulsive materials such as fat, felt, honey, blood, and dead animals. During the postwar era, Beuys developed an oeuvre that placed a greater emphasis on ideas than art … Akin to Andy Warhol in influence but with a more widely (and wildly) ranging formal vocabulary, Beuys counted debate and teaching as part of his art and was a leader in many socioeconomic reform movements. For example, in his groundbreaking 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Beuys—who was covered in symbolic materials such as honey, gold leaf, and iron—explained artworks to a cradled hare. Free shipping on many items | Browse your favorite brands | affordable prices. They were also recurring motifs in works suggesting that art, common materials, and one's "everyday life" were ultimately inseparable. [Internet]. Beuys would periodically vary the bleak rhythm of this scenario by walking around the cramped space, one footstep muffled by the felt, the other amplified by the iron. Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), alchemist, social visionary and artist, was born in Germany. Joseph Beuys was a German-born artist active in Europe and the United States from the 1950s through the early 1980s, who came to be associated with that era's international, Conceptual art and Fluxus movements. Beuys would later recall, in an unsubstantiated account, that when, in 1933, the recently formed National Socialist German Workers' Party (or Nazi Party) staged a book-burning rally at Kleve (Beuys would have been aged 12), he rescued from the flames Carolus Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) - one of history's most groundbreaking works of scientific literature. That sort of thinking is tied up with the idea of art as a craft, with the work-bench and the drawing-table. Limited-Edition Prints by Leading Artists, Untitled (Vitrine with Four Objects/Plateau Central), 1962-1983, "Beuys - Rauschenberg - Twombly - Warhol", SIGNED Exhibition Catalogue by Beuys/Rauschenberg/Warhol, Munich Prestel, 1982, Halley's Comet (Halleyischer Komet), 1980. Painter, sculptor, and conceptualist Joseph Beuys is one of the most influential artists of the latter half of the 20th century. Joseph Beuys served as an aircraft operator during World War II. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices. Joseph Beuys, (born May 12, 1921, Krefeld, Ger.—died Jan. 23, 1986, Düsseldorf), German avant-garde sculptor and performance artist whose works, characterized by unorthodox materials and ritualistic activity, stirred much controversy.. Beuys was educated in Rindern, Ger., and served in the German air force throughout World War II.In 1943 his plane crashed in the frozen Crimea. He was an only child, to the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys and his wife Johanna Maria Margarete Hulsermann. Social sculpture is a theory developed by the artist Joseph Beuys in the 1970s based on the concept that everything is art, that every aspect of life could be approached creatively and, as a result, everyone has the potential to be an artist So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness.". Joseph Beuys ( BOYSS, German: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs]; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a painter, sculptor, medallist, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue. Free shipping on many items | Browse your favorite brands | affordable prices. Woman/Animal Skull suggests a melding of the rational and the instinctual, or of the human and the animal minds out of a primordial state of organic chaos. ", "I don't believe that an art school, which should stress new artistic concepts, should lay emphasis on fixed places to work in the school. : Conversation with Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man, Joseph Beuys & Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, Joseph Beuys: Early Drawings (Schirmer's Visual Library), My Life in Art: How Joseph Beuys convinced me of the power of conceptual art, Joseph Beuys: Artist Who Expanded Art's Boundaries, Revolution in Felt and Fat: Joseph Beuys's New York comeback, New MoMA Acquisitions Include Beuys Pieces, Joseph Beuys Plight 1986 : State of the Art Episode 3, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Beuys was a key participant in the 1960s Fluxus movement. Beuys is especially famous for works incorporating animal fat and felt, two common materials - one organic, the other fabricated, or industrial - that had profound personal meaning to the artist. This multiple, a relic of Joseph Beuys’ action Felt TV (1966), is composed of three props (the boxing gloves, felt pad, and sausage) and a film of the performance.In the 11-minute film, Beuys explored metaphors of communication and energy through the medium of television. His performance art "actions" were shamanistic experiences incorporating ritualized movement and sound, as well as non-traditional and even repulsive materials such as fat, felt, honey, blood, and dead animals. 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. Joseph Beuys was one of the leading figures in the avant-garde movement in Europe in the 1970s and 1980's. Retrouvez les œuvres d’art en vente et toutes les informations sur Joseph Beuys (allemand, 1921-1986). Joseph Beuys Biography. Represented by internationally reputable galleries. Fat Chair exemplifies how Beuys could turn two common materials of everyday life - here the organic components of fat and wood - into a composite, open-ended metaphor for the human body, its impermanent condition, and the tendencies for social life to conform to constructed convention. Artcritical.com / (In an ironic turn, Beuys was himself compelled by legal fiat to join the Hitler Youth movement by the time he was a teenager). In the work of Joseph Beuys dubbed I Like America and America Likes Me, the artist is on a mission to illustrate that it is possible for human beings to coexist with nature. All Rights Reserved, What Is Art? How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (German: wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt) was a performance piece enacted by the German artist Joseph Beuys on 26 November 1965 at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf.While it was only Beuys’s first solo exhibition in a private gallery, it is sometimes referred to as his best known action. Art comes from intelligence, one must have something to say, but on the other side, that of capability, one must be able to express it. A German artist collective stole a Joseph Beuys artwork from a Münster museum and gave it to an institution in Tanzania—and made a rollicking video about their stunt. Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf, Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors, "Every man is a plastic artist who must determine things for himself. Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, a small city in northwest Germany. View Joseph Beuys’s 9,404 artworks on artnet. A major figure of the postwar German avant-garde, Joseph Beuys viewed art as a vehicle for social change. [Internet]. Updated and modified regularly [Accessed ] Beuys suggested, in both his teaching and in his mature "action" and sculptural artworks, that "art" might not ultimately constitute a specialized profession but, rather, a heightened humanitarian attitude, or way of conducting one's life, in every realm of daily activity. Joseph Beuys was a leading German Conceptual and performance artist. Joseph Beuys - Germany. Joseph Heinrich Beuys, né à Krefeld, sur la rive gauche du Rhin inférieur, le 12 mai 1921 et mort le 23 janvier 1986 à Düsseldorf, est un artiste allemand qui a produit nombre de dessins, de sculptures, de performances, fluxus, happening de vidéos, d’installations et de théories, dans un ensemble artistique très engagé politiquement. Beuys's diverse body of work ranges from traditional media of drawing, painting, and sculpture, to process-oriented, or time-based "action" art, the performance of which suggested how art may exercise a healing effect (on both the artist and the audience) when it takes up psychological, social, and/or political subjects. Art Brokerage: Joseph Beuys German Artist: b. This work on paper dates from Beuys's early experimental phase, which was characterized by the artist's production of thousands of drawings under a self-imposed program of aesthetic asceticism.