Joseph Beuys
Social sculpture.
Joseph Beuys staged performances with felt, fat and a dead hare and held that everyone is an artist. He planted 7,000 oaks in Kassel.
Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld and grew up in Kleve near the Dutch border. During the Second World War he served as a radio operator and gunner in the German air force. In 1944 his plane crashed in the Crimea. Beuys later claimed that Tatars had saved him by wrapping him in fat and felt. The story is largely disputed and probably embellished, but fat and felt became his most important materials.
After the war he studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. In the late 1950s he went through a deep crisis of depression. In 1961 he himself became a professor at the academy, and during the 1960s he came into contact with the Fluxus movement, which worked with performance and events. He made actions and objects with materials such as fat, felt, honey, copper and dead animals. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare of 1965 he sat with his face covered in honey and gold leaf, whispering to a dead hare cradled in his arms.
Beuys held that everyone is an artist and that society itself can be shaped like a sculpture, which he called social sculpture. In 1972 he was dismissed from the academy after admitting students who had been rejected. In the action I Like America and America Likes Me of 1974 he spent three days in a New York gallery with a coyote.
He was also politically active and was one of the founders of the German Green Party. His best-known project is 7000 Oaks, launched at the documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1982. A basalt stone was set beside each newly planted oak, and the last oak was planted in 1987, the year after his death.
Beuys died in 1986. With his felt hat and fishing vest he became one of the best-known and most debated artists of the post-war era. He widened the limits of what art can be and influenced performance, installation art and politically engaged art alike.