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A comprehensive biography of Joseph Beuys, a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist who influenced social sculpture and environmentalism. Learn about his life, work, legacy, and controversies from his childhood in the Third Reich to his death in 1986.
Learn about Joseph Beuys, a pioneer of performance art, social sculpture, and environmental art. Explore his biography, artworks, and legacy at Tate, a leading museum of modern and contemporary art.
Jan 5, 2021 · Learn about the life and work of Joseph Beuys, a German artist who challenged the boundaries of art, politics, and education. Discover his bizarre stories, surreal sculptures, and social sculpture concept.
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Learn about Joseph Beuys, a German sculptor and performance artist who used unorthodox materials and ritualistic actions to challenge conventional art and politics. Explore his life, works, and influence in this article from Britannica.
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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 Fluxusmovements. Beuys's diverse body of work ranges from traditional media of drawing, painting, and sculpture, to process-oriented, or time-based "action" ...
Beuys was a key participant in the 1960s Fluxus movement. At that time, many artists in Asia, Europe, and the United States became dissatisfied with a long tradition of "heroic," or object-oriented...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. topical i...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...Beuys frequently blurred the lines between art and life, and fact and fiction, by suggesting that what one believed to constitute "reality" mattered more in matters of human action, social/politica...Childhood
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, a small city in northwest Germany. He was an only child, to the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys and his wife Johanna Maria Margarete Hulsermann. The two were a devout Catholic couple of the northern Rhine-Westphalian middle-class. Just months after Beuys's birth, the family moved south to the industrial town of Kleve. Beuys would later recall, in an unsubstantiated account, that when, in 1933, the recently formed National Socialist German Workers' Party (or Nazi P...
Early Training
While Beuys's military subscription was voluntary, he had no desire to see actual combat. Thus in keeping with his interest in medicine, Beuys continued his studies in biology and zoology in the early 1940s. According to his own account of 1979, a pivotal (and, once again, unverifiable) event changed the course of Beuys's life in March of 1944, when his battle plane was shot down over the Crimean Front in the Ukraine. Beuys claims to have been promptly rescued by a nomadic tribe of Tartars, w...
Mature Period
Thus following on the heels of a tumultuous early life, Beuys's first official validation arrived in 1961, when he was appointed Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (where he himself had earlier studied). Beuys made significant waves while occupying this post, first by abolishing all entry requirements (virtually anyone could join his classes), and associating with a group of experimental creatives at Düsseldorf, among them progressive video artist Nam...
Learn about Joseph Beuys, a key figure of Conceptual art and Fluxus movements, who used animal fat and felt to explore the healing potential of art. Discover his biography, ideas, and works that blurred the lines between art and life.
- German
- May 12, 1921
- Krefeld, Germany
- January 23, 1986
Learn about Joseph Beuys, a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist who expanded the concept of art and influenced social sculpture. Explore his works, exhibitions, publications, and biography at MoMA.
Joseph Beuys was a German sculptor, painter, installation artist, art theorist and art pedagogue, and is considered one of the most influential European performance artists. In his early school years, he was considered to have a natural talent for drawing, and he visited the sculpting studio of Achilles Moortgat many times.
