Joseph Beuys

Born: 1921 | Died: 1986

Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, western Germany. In 1940 he joined the military, volunteering in order to avoid the draft. He was trained as an aircraft radio operator and combat pilot, at the end of the war he was held in a British prisoner-of-war camp for several months, and returned to Germany in 1945.

Coming to terms with his involvement in the war was a long process and figures in much of his artwork. Beuys often said that his interest in fat and felt as sculptural materials grew out of a wartime experience--a plane crash in the Crimea, after which he was rescued by nomadic Tartars who rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt to heal and warm his body. While the story actually has little grounding in real events, its poetics are strong enough to have made the story one of the most enduring aspects of his mythic biography.

On his return from the war, Beuys abandoned his plans for a career in medicine and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture. He married in 1959 and two years later, at the age of 40, was appointed to a professorship at his alma mater.

Beuys’ charismatic presence, his urgent and public calls for reform of all kinds, and his unconventional artistic style (incorporating ritualized movement and sound, and materials such as fat, felt, earth, honey, blood, and even dead animals) gained him international notoriety during these decades, but it also cost him his job. Beuys was dismissed in 1972 from his teaching position over his insistence that admission to the art school be open to anyone who wished to study there. His reputation in the international art world solidified after a 1979 retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum and made him one of the most influential and controversial artists of the 20th century.