Joseph Beuys: Healing a Wounded World

Who was Joseph Beuys?

The world was set to celebrate the centenary of the birth of one of the most significant 20th-century artists, Joseph Beuys, on 12 May 2021 with numerous museums, cultural institutions and cities focusing on the Rhineland-born artist throughout 2021. Over the course of his career, contemporary artist Beuys, who has been acclaimed as the founder of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, refused to fit his practice into any defined category. He blurred the lines between life and art, extending their definition, believing and advocating that spiritually and socially engaged artists had the power to change the world for good.

Biography of Joseph Beuys

The turmoils of World War II

Beuys grew up in the small village of Kleve, during the period when Hitler came to power and turned Germany into a dictatorship. In 1940, at age 19, he joined the German air force and for five years of World War II, he served as a fighter pilot. He was wounded several times and interned in a British prisoner-of-war camp. Three years into the war, his plane was hit and crashed in a snowstorm in Crimea, between the German and the Russian fronts. Beuys claimed that he was found in the wreckage and rescued by a clan of nomadic Tatars, who covered his body in animal fat to help it regenerate heat, and wrapped it in felt, as an insulator to keep the warmth, that eventually saved his life. The story explains his use of common materials such as fat and felt in his work. He saw art as a magical, transformative force and believed that a powerful myth contained more truth than everyday reality.

The healing power of art and teaching

After the turmoils of the war, Beuys dedicated his life to art. He returned home in 1946, but overcoming his involvement in the war would require a self-healing process that was central to his art, and to the rest of his life. At the end of 1947, he went to the Düsseldorf Art Academy and studied there until 1951, in a time when Düsseldorf was still rubble and its citizens emotionally depleted. After the Art Academy, Beuys set up his own studio in Heerdt, a suburb of Düsseldorf, and rented a small loft in an old bakery, working under the roof. He would spend much time recuperating on a friend’s farm as well, where he made hundreds of drawings and small sculptures. In 1961, he became a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

Beuys saw his role as an artist as a teacher or shaman who could guide society in a new direction. For Beuys, education was also intimately tied to politics, and his students often discussed current issues besides his thrilling lessons about art-making. In educating his students in such a visionary way, Beuys helped foster a whole new generation of German artists. Among his students were Lothar Baumgarten, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff, and Blinky Palermo. He continued teaching at the Kunstakademie until 1972, when he was dismissed without notice after getting into a standoff with the school’s leaders over admissions policies. At the same time, he began to develop his sculptural practice, creating works that rank among his best-known pieces. Such objects present surreal combinations of seemingly unlike objects and unconventional materials. During this period he developed his artistic agenda, exploring metaphorical and symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems. Yet during his day, he was best known for his performances, many of which only survived him in the form of documentation.