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Biography of Joseph Beuys
The German artist Joseph Heinrich Beuys was born in Krefeld in 1921. Both controversial and admired, he is considered the German counterpart of the Fluxus artists, and is internationally recognized as one of the major artists of contemporary art. A multidisciplinary artist, he produced a large number of drawings, sculptures, multiples and prints, performances, videos, installations and theories, in a very politically engaged artistic ensemble. It was when he discovered illustrations of Wilhelm Lehmbruck's sculptures in the 1930s that Beuys felt a strong urge to become a sculptor. As a Luftwaffe pilot on the Russian front during the Second World War, his plane crashed in the Crimea; is the story of his rescue imaginary? In any case, it will be the starting point of a different path. From the end of the war, he became the emblematic figure of the Fluxus-Bewegung movement. The artist invented a character for himself, recognizable by his hat and vest, who invested all fields. He will then strive to conduct his work as an existential project. His work will be a permanent questioning on the themes of humanism, ecology, sociology, and especially anthroposophy (the "science of the spirit", a current of thought and spirituality created at the beginning of the 20th century by Rudolf Steiner). In 1961 he was appointed professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. His career led him to define, among other things, the concept of "social sculpture" as a "total work of art", which he formulated in the 1970s with his "Every person an artist", through the demand for a creative dialogue between society and politics. In 1974, Beuys made his first trip to the United States and exhibited for the first time in France (Galerie Bama). In 1978 he was appointed a member of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. The following year Joseph Beuys met and became friends with Andy Warhol, who began a series of portraits of the artist. His first major retrospective exhibition is held at the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the early 1980s Joseph Beuys donated about 1000 works to the Sztuki Museum in Lödz, Poland, this donation to be understood as a symbolic gesture against the division of Europe into two blocs. Joseph Beuys died in Düsseldorf in 1986.
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