Neoexpresionismul a apărut la sfârșitul anilor 1970, concentrându-se pe lucrări de artă

îndrăznețe, expresive și încărcate emoțional. Unele idei cheie includ o respingere a

minimalismului și conceptualismului, o întoarcere la arta figurativă, accent pe conținutul
personal și emoțional, folosirea de culori vibrante și pensule energice și concentrarea pe
experiența subiectivă a artistului, mai degrabă decât pe normele sau tendințele societale.
Artiști precum Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel și Anselm Kiefer au fost figuri
proeminente în această mișcare, fiecare aducând în prim-plan propriul stil unic și accent
tematic.

Neoexpresionismul în artă a avut un impact profund asupra muzicii, în special în tărâmurile

punk, post-punk și new wave. Accentul mișcării pe emoția brută, expresia îndrăzneață și o
respingere a normelor stabilite a rezonat cu muzicieni. Din punct de vedere liric și sonor,
aceste genuri au îmbrățișat o expresie brută, nefiltrată a emoției și a comentariului social,
făcând ecou spiritului mișcării artei vizuale. Muzicieni precum David Bowie, Talking Heads,
The Clash și alții au încorporat elemente de neo-expresionism în muzica lor prin sunete
neconvenționale, versuri încărcate emoțional și spectacole izbitoare vizual, creând o sinergie
între formele de artă.

„Transavantgarde” (sau „Transavanguardia”) se referă la o mișcare de artă italiană care a

apărut la sfârșitul anilor 1970 și începutul anilor 1980. Condus de criticul de artă Achille
Bonito Oliva, acesta avea unele asemănări cu neo-expresionismul, dar era mai divers în
influențele sale stilistice. Mișcarea a căutat o revigorare a tehnicilor tradiționale de pictură,
îmbinându-le adesea cu subiectul contemporan. Artiștii Transavanguardia au îmbrățișat arta
figurativă, culorile îndrăznețe și o întoarcere la narațiune și simbolism, respingând
constrângerile conceptualismului și minimalismului. Personalitățile cheie au inclus Sandro
Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi și Mimmo Paladino, fiecare contribuind cu stilul lor
unic la mișcare. Transavanguardia a subliniat fuziunea dintre trecut și prezent, inspirându-se
din istoria artei, îmbrățișând în același timp un simț reînnoit al expresiei și al individualității.

„Die Neue Wilde” se traduce prin „The New Wild Ones” în engleză și se referă la un grup de
artiști germani din anii 1980 care împărtășeau asemănări cu mișcarea neo-expresionistă.
Această mișcare a subliniat lucrări de artă vibrante, îndrăznețe și adesea haotice,
respingând tendințele minimaliste predominante la acea vreme. Artiști asociați cu Die Neue
Wilde, precum Martin Kippenberger, Jörg Immendorff și A. R. Penck, au creat picturi vii,
expresive, caracterizate prin culori intense, pensule energice și o întoarcere la reprezentarea
figurativă. Munca lor a purtat deseori nuanțe socio-politice și a reflectat dorința de a se rupe
de normele artistice stabilite, îmbrățișând o formă de exprimare mai neîngrădită și mai
crudă.

Cunoscut ca Neue Wilden (New Fauves) în Germania, Transavanguardia

(Transavangarda) în Italia și Figuration Libre în Franța, neoexpresionismul este
considerată ultima mișcare internațională majoră în arta modernă.

Neuen Wilden , sau New Savages , sunt un grup de artiști neo-expresionisti germani, activi
în anii 1980 la Berlin și Germania. Ele reprezintă echivalentul Transavanguardia italiană .
Termenul „New Wild” s-a născut în 1980 , când a fost folosit pentru a desemna artiștii expuși
într-o expoziție de grup la Neue Galerie-Sammlung Ludwig din Aachen din Germania: scopul
expoziției, Die Neuen Wilden [The New Wilds] , a fost să compar arta lui Markus Lüpertz și
AR Penck cu cea a noilor pictori americani și francezi. Criticii au continuat apoi să
desemneze cu acest nume un grup de pictori
mai tineri, adepți ai unei picturi „țipătoare” și gestuale, cu tonuri violente și disonante. Sunt
Helmut Middendorf , Rainer Fetting și Salomé, elevi ai lui Karl Horst Hödicke la Academia de
Arte Frumoase din Berlin , care expun într-o galerie autogestionată din MoritzPlatz, în
districtul Kreuzberg; lor li se adaugă Hans Peter Adamski , Elvira Bach , Peter Bömmels ,
Luciano Castelli , Walter Dahn , Jiri Georg Dokoupil , Thomas Lange, Gerhard Naschberger ,
Maarten Ploeg , Otto Zitko și Bernd Zimmer
.
Acești artiști preluează , extinzând formate și furie expresivă, expresionismul german al
Brücke , conștienți cu siguranță de ceea ce făcea Transavanguardia italiană și în ton, în
multe privințe, cu producția monumentală a maeștrilor germani puțin mai vechi decât ei,
precum Gerard Richter , Anselm Kiefer , Georg Baselitz , Markus Lüpertz , AR Penck și Jörg
Immendorff . Cu toate acestea, ele se disting printr-un limbaj mai liber și mai agresiv și prin
subiectele abordate. Se acordă puțină atenție aspectelor politice și ocupate care au stabilit
acum ritmul și interesează doar unii artiști care lucrează în Republica Democrată Germană .
Ceea ce fascinează este viața de noapte, cluburile, locurile și modalitățile de socializare,
care sunt aceleași în toate mitropolele lumii occidentale. Furia sălbatică a semnului devine o
modalitate de a exprima un mod de viață alienant și hiperstimulant, alcătuit din dans, sex,
droguri și, de asemenea, deschis tuturor formelor de perversiune.

Neoexpresionismul
Neoexpresionismul a fost o mișcare artistică, axată în cea mai mare parte pe pictură , care
s-a născut în anii șaptezeci ai secolului al XX-lea și se caracterizează printr-o recuperare
decisivă a figurii umane, reprezentată adesea sub lentila deformată a neliniștii. În ciuda
acestui fapt, este o imagine care se deteriorează, se uzează și se dematerializează în
spatele tratamentului pictural dur.

Răspândit în special în Statele Unite , Germania și Italia , neoexpresionismul, după anarhia

experimentală din anii precedenți, a indicat o cale care călătorește înapoi la redescoperirea
formelor mai tradiționale. Poate că acesta este unul dintre motivele pentru care a fost bine
primit de comercianții și colecționarii de artă din întreaga lume.

Principalii exponenți în Statele Unite sunt Julian Schnabel , cunoscut mai ales pentru
„tablourile sale” și David Salle care, totuși, denotă o relație strânsă cu Assemblage și
Expresionismul abstract și care manipulează imaginea, invariabil recuperată din imaginația
colectivă, în cheia voyeurismului rafinat și ironic. În orice caz, este necesar să menționăm
numele lui Jean-Michel Basquiat pentru întreaga perioadă în care a ars în parabola sa
inevitabil descendentă.

În Germania, unde memoria expresionismului este încă puternică și în care noile generații
simt nevoia să se distanțeze de holocaustul trecut, exponenții săi sunt uneori numiți Neuen
Wilden , „Noii sălbatici”. Exponenți de seamă sunt Georg Baselitz cu imaginile sale inversate
și Anselm Kiefer care tinde să amestece elementele artei tradiționale cu elementele
avangardei, propunând mai multe versiuni ale temei Holocaustului . Lucrările așa-numiților
„noi sălbatici” împărtășesc un cromatism violent și extrem de expresiv, o figurare simplificată
și adesea elementară, un sentiment tragic al umanității și istoriei.
În Italia, această nouă tendință a fost adesea înscrisă în contextul a ceea ce Achille Bonito
Oliva numea Transavanguardia în '79 : „Transavantgarde a răspuns în termeni contextuali la
catastrofa generalizată a istoriei și culturii, deschizându-se către o poziție de depășire a
purului materialismul tehnicilor și al materialelor noi și ajungând la recuperarea depășirii
picturii, înțeleasă ca abilitatea de a restabili caracterul unui erotism intens procesului creativ,
grosimea unei imagini care nu se privește de plăcerea reprezentării și narațiune ". Cei mai
proeminenți exponenți sunt Sandro Chia , cu un fler manierist care pictează cu un gest
încărcat care se desfășoară pe pânze cu culori vii și combinații violente care amintesc
cumva tradiția lui Rosso Fiorentino ; Enzo Cucchi , un experimentator care
face cu ochiul ocazional Conceptualismului și Francesco Clemente și Mimmo Paladino care
par să atingă totul și apoi par să folosească totul pentru a reprezenta ceea ce văd printre
planurile alunecoase ascunse ale inconștientului lor expresiv.

Unii pictori din zona engleză, precum Lucian Freud, pot fi, de asemenea, plasați în curentul
neo expresionismului. Pictor cu siguranță figurativ care călătorește spre redescoperirea unei
tradițiipur portretiste. Deși portretele sale sunt mai interne decât externe, mai introspective
decât reflexive,dar întotdeauna cu o cunoaștere inexcepțională a anatomiei.

Neo-expresionismul descrie o renaștere internațională a tendințelor expresioniste apărute în

rândul pictorilor din anii 1970 și 1980. Reacționând împotriva intelectualismului detașat și a
purității ideologice a minimalismului și conceptualismului, neo-expresionistii s-au întors la
reprezentarea figurală, producând lucrări texturale violente, emoționale, care au sintetizat
expresia picturală cu însușirea postmodernistă Diversitate de influențe producând opere
texturale, violent emotive, care sintetizează expresia picturală cu însuşirea postmodernistă.
O diversitate de influențe, inclusiv expresionismul de la începutul secolului al XX-lea,
suprarealismul, expresionismul abstract și arta pop, au informat diferite încarnări ale stilului
care a apărut în întreaga lume:
Neue Wilden („New Fauves”) în Germania, Transvanguardia („Trans-Avantgarde”) în Italia,
Figuration Libre („Free Style”) în Franța și o mulțime de tineri artiști din Statele Unite, inclusiv
Jean-Michel Basquiat și Julian Schnabel. Impulsat de tactici de marketing agresive,
neoexpresionismul a dominat piețele de artă europene și americane până la mijlocul anilor
1980 și a devenit strâns asociat cu decadența și excesul perioadei.
​
Deoarece termenul de neo-expresionism nu se referă la o mișcare formală, ci mai degrabă
la o renaștere internațională a interesului pentru reprezentarea figurală și tendințele
picturale, el cuprinde o diversitate de stiluri. În general, lucrările neo-expresioniste se
caracterizează prin subiectivitatea lor expresivă intensă, aplicațiile de vopsea foarte
texturate, culorile contrastante viu și revenirea la imaginea narativă la scară largă.
Bazându-se pe istorie, mit și folclor, neoexpresionismul dezvăluie tulpini de simbolism și
primitivism, cu figuri distorsionate, arhetipale redate în diferite grade de abstractizare. Ca o
reflectare a lumii postmoderne, un sentiment de tensiune, alienare și ambiguitate este
adesea însoțit de jucăuș și parodie. În timp ce sunt asociați în primul rând cu pictura,
neo-expresioniştii au încorporat, de asemenea, obiecte găsite precum paie, nisip, lemn și
ceramică în pânzele lor pentru a crea semifabricate. -lucrari sculpturale.
ARTIŞTI REPREZENTATIVI:

Summary of Martin Kippenberger

Though unpopular with the German art establishment, Martin Kippenberger was
regarded by many of his contemporaries to be the most vigorous and audacious of
the post-post-war generation of German artists. During his short life, the
combustible, irreverent and prolific artist worked across many mediums including
painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, performance art, installation art, and
music experimentation. Though he claimed he "didn't have a style," Kippenberger is
generally recognized for his penchant for appropriation, his use of found and/or
sundry objects, and his insistence that art should connect in some way with the
everyday world. His art is often said to recall the impudent, and at times aggressive,
spirit of early Dadaism, and at times the ironic playfulness of Pop Art; or what
became known from the eighties as Neo-Pop Art.

Accomplishments

​ The post-war generation of German artists, proudly represented on the

international stage by the likes of Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys, were
using art to help process their country's catastrophic recent history.
Kippenberger thought that, some thirty years forward, German art needed to
become more 'alive'. For him, no subject was too sacred, nor too trivial, and
his work drew on any point of reference - cultural, historical, personal - to
deliver ironic statements on the art world and its history. He can then be
grouped with the provocative Neo-Pop Art movement - which brings together
the likes of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Katharina Fritsch, Cady Noland, Keith
 Haring - that used consumer culture and everyday readymades as a way to
critique Western culture and its values.
​ Kippenberger had not been swayed by the latest maxim that "painting was
dead" and, though he worked across most mediums, he was happy to explore
the future possibilities for painting by producing crude and impudent
canvases that became known as his Bad Paintings. Bad Painting is associated
with artistic movement beginning in the late 1970s and gained recognition as
a movement following the 1978 "Bad Painting" exhibition at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art of New York. The exhibition's curator, the art critic Marcia
Tucker, had been interested in bringing together a provocative, spontaneous
art that challenged the idea of artistic "good taste" through its crude aesthetic
and technical application (Kippenberger did not feature in the exhibition).
​ Kippenberger was insistent that art should be part of the everyday world and
he railed against institutionalized highbrow art such as Neo-Expressionism.
For Kippenberger, art was about ideas and concepts over skilful execution and
he drew inspiration, not so much from political and social history, but more
from inconsequential cultural events and objects. His aim was to poke fun at
pompous artistic orthodoxies (hence the label Bad Paintings).
​ Kippenberger was a nomadic individual who travelled to locations including
Florence, Madrid, Vienna, Los Angeles and Syros. His restlessness tallied with
the image of an errant son - an iconoclast - whose "attitude" brought added
interest to his art. He was alert to the importance of publicity (and
self-publicity) and he embraced his notoriety to full effect. Kippenberger knew
that if he was to "seize the moment", then the personality of the artist - or the
artist's legend - must do the job of announcing his art to the biggest public.
His self-styled "rebellious swagger" had an especially profound impact on the
Young British Artists (YBAs) group who followed his example in exploiting
their own celebrity - or rather their infamy - to inform on readings of their art
works.

Important Art by Martin Kippenberger

PROGRESSION OF ART
 Artwork Images
1976
Uno di voi, un tedesco en Firenze (One of you, a German in Florence)

Kippenberger painted Uno di voi at the very start of his career while living in
Florence. It documents his experiences as a foreigner lost in the streets of an
unknown city. Uno di voi features a montage of black and white paintings
depicting a range of seemingly disconnected subjects - including portraits of a
local milkman, a wanted criminal, a stuffed pig, a copy of a Botticelli painting
from the Uffizi and a dead pigeon - drawn from souvenir postcards and his own
street photography. Kippenberger had originally intended to produce enough
paintings to make a stack at a height of the artist himself, but this goal proved
impracticable.

Each image is painted to the same-size and detail, and though Kippenberger's
subject matter is more eclectic and more autobiographical, it still invites
comparisons with the work of Gerhard Richter, and especially his 48 Portraits of
Important Men (1972). Kippenberger had indeed acknowledged the influence of
Richter, but he was part of a new generation of post-modern artists who wanted
to move away from what was an overtly political Post-war German art. Taking
their lead rather from the Swiss Dadaists and the Pop artists, he wanted to
invest art with a new feel for humor and irony, something he believed was
lacking in the earnest work of the German Neo-Expressionists. Kippenberger
achieves this here by allowing everyday street scenes to take their 'rightful' place
along-side canonical works of art. The artist favored a layered, ahistorical
approach to producing art and his predilection for the absurd, quite evident in
Uno di voi's incredulous juxtapositions, would characterize his whole career.

Oil on canvas
 Artwork Images
1981
Untitled from the series Lieber maler male mir (Dear painter, paint for

me)

Two men walk arm in arm away from us towards a Düsseldorf bar on a busy day.
The taller of the two is Kippenberger, he is gripping a friend's arm for support.
Despite their relatively formal attire, both men have a dishevelled look about
them, suggestive of a certain fragility. One would be forgiven for thinking that the
friends were headed to the bar (in daytime) in order to drown their sorrows. The
painting is one of an early career series of twelve for which Kippenberger
commissioned a well-known film poster painter - known only as "Mr. Werner" - to
paint the image. The images were copied meticulously from Kippenberger's own
photographs of ordinary street scenes and he hired a 'technical' painter to render
the work for ideological reasons. Kippenberger was influenced by Andy Warhol's
factory-like approach to making art whereby employees would assist heavily in
art production. He supported the principle that the idea driving the artwork - the
concept - was more important than the skill in the artistic execution: "I'm rather
like a travelling salesman" he said "I deal in ideas. I am far more to people than
someone who paints pictures." Dear Painter, Paint Me, was then a deliberate
affront to the dominant trend of German Neo-Expressionism which promoted a
style of earnest socio-political enquiry over such frivolous conceptual play.

Oil on canvas

Artwork Images
1981
Dialogue with the Youth of Today

In this somewhat graphic self-portrait, Kippenberger is shown beaten, bruised

and bandaged. His eyes, nose and upper lip are swollen and covered in yellow
bruises. The portrait was made while Kippenberger was manager at the
notorious Berlin punk club S.O.36. He had been attacked one night by a gang led
by a punk known as "Ratten-Jenny" (earning that prefix on account of the rat she
always carried on her shoulder). The gang had felt aggrieved when Kippenberger
raised the club's beer prices and had taken a special dislike to Kippenberger's
formal, preppy way of dressing. Gallerist Bruno Brunnet added that his attackers
were probably more "mad at Martin for having bought his way into SO36" (their
club).

On arrival at hospital, Kippenberger called up a number of his friends with the

aim of documenting his ordeal in photographs. It would be Jutta Henglein who
provided him with source material for what would become a trilogy of paintings.
Following the attack, Kippenberger was left with a crooked nose and several
facial scars. But he seized on the opportunity to create a strong
autobiographical statement in a trilogy of photoreal paintings called Berlin by
Night (one of which was Dialogue with the Youth Today). As with many of his
self-portraits, Kippenberger presents himself as a broken down, fragile figure.
Indeed, beneath the witty, ironic title there is a latent sense of personal failure in
this painting; an undercurrent which ran through much of his work. Kippenberger
was of course unafraid to address the difficult subjects and situations he
encountered in his life. It was an attitude that would enamour him to so many of
his contemporaries.

Oil on canvas
 Artwork Images
1982
Capri by Night

Taking his lead from Pop Art, Kippenberger was interested in the way ordinary
objects, once appropriated, could be treated as, or transformed into, works of
art. However, Capri by Night fits within the realms of what became known as
Neo-Pop Art. Here a Ford Capri car, a "readymade", is parked inside a gallery. It is
covered, moreover, in a mixture of orange and brown paint mixed together with
oat flakes. The unusual color and texture, not to mention its setting inside a
gallery, invites the spectator to consider the Capri as something more - or
something other - than a car. As a piece of Pop Art the art work in question need
be no more than an emblem of nihilism and consumer culture; or just a joke
delivered at the expense of the modern art world. But there is more for the
spectator to contemplate here and it was this willingness to challenge Western
culture and its values that gives the work added "bite". Kippenberger produced
Capri by Night in collaboration with his friend Albert Oehlen in the early 1980s
when the two were leading figures on the Cologne art scene. It was in fact one
of a series of artworks he made featuring the car. Kippenberger saw the Capri,
which was such a popular car in Germany and the rest of Europe in the 1970s
and 80s, as symbolic of modern, or every-day, life. And despite its Italian
sounding name (named after the Italian island), the car was originally made in
America, a state of affairs that Kippenberger found rather ironic.

Kippenberger and Oehlen often used their art to parody the work of other artists.
This was done not out of spite but in the name of pastiche and 'quotation', both
key signifiers of the playful, and often controversial, Neo-Pop tendency. By
covering the Capri - such a gleaming symbol of consumer culture - in the paint
and oat flakes mixture Kippenberger and Oehlen managed to undermine the
socio-political intentions of two of the most important Post-war German artists:
Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. Beuys had mixed his own shade of brown
paint, which he named "braunkreuz" (brown cross), as a means of signifying rust,
blood and dirt, while the rough, oatmeal texture referenced Kiefer's tactile
symbolic paintings that mixed straw and burlap together with oils. In the case of
Capri by Night, Kippenberger and Oehlen were able then to deliver their stinging
rebuke of the deadly solemn tone of post-war German art.

Ford Capri Car, paint, oat flakes

Artwork Images
1988
Self Portrait

In this self-portrait we see a half-naked Kippenberger slumped in an enormous

pair of white underpants, his face obscured by a blue balloon. The artist is once
more depicted in unflattering details: a swollen beer belly, rolls of fat, a thick
neck and drooping shoulders suggesting a mood of dejected resignation. This
painting is one of a cycle of seven self-portraits produced by Kippenberger
between the late 1980s and early 1990s. They are often referred to colloquially
as the Picasso Paintings or the Underwear Paintings; the huge white underpants
he wears match those worn by an elderly Picasso in a series of famous
photographic portraits. While the artist made self-portraits throughout his career
(Dialogue with the Youth of Today for instance) these were amongst the most
honest and unflattering. Here Kippenberger, aged just 35, captures his
prematurely aged body which has started to show the effects of his excessive
lifestyle; the floating balloon that covers his face might suggest a feeling of
shame and self-loathing. Like a number of artists before him, including Picasso,
Warhol and Beuys, Kippenberger saw his persona as an integral part of his art.
But where his predecessors were invested in creating and sustaining their own
mythologies, Kippenberger - who was apt to remind his public that "every artist is
a human being" - maintained a persona that was deeply introspective and
self-critical. It was unusual for a male artist to dismantle his aura in this way. But
he has influenced many artists since, particularly women such as Jenny Saville
and Maria Lassnig who are interested in exploring honest ways of representing
the female figure in art.

Oil on canvas

Artwork Images
1993
Untitled

This somewhat delicate pencil drawing depicts a man in a workman's vest

hammering two screws into his nose. Under the man's raised right hand a
caption reads "do it yourself", perhaps indicating the self-destructive nature of a
nomadic creative life. In the top right is a logo that reads Parkhotel, Liepzigerhof
Restaurant, Innsbruck, thus confirming that the drawing was made on hotel
paper (in Austria). Having spent many weeks lodging in hotels around the world,
Kippenberger's drawing is one of hundreds made throughout his career on
collected samples of hotel paper. In this series Kippenberger was influenced by
Joseph Beuys's drawing series To Mikis Theodorakis (1982), also made on hotel
paper. Like Beuys, Kippenberger made art on a range of surfaces, and hotel
paper was a legitimate found source on which to impress new ideas. Though
Kippenberger had parodied Beuys in the past (in Capri at Night for example) the
artists shared an interest in the processes of recycling and renewal. The
drawings are often sketchy and contain elements of writing, making them closer
to diary entries than autonomous artworks. Together image and text reveal
Kippenberger's fleeting thoughts and ideas, providing the purest record, perhaps,
of where his life and art become most closely abutted.

Drawing on paper
 Artwork Images
1994
The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika

This artwork is a complex installation where objects including tables, chairs and
freestanding sculptures have been placed on a green ground, suggestive of
grass. Chairs have been arranged to face one another, as if several job
interviews are about to take place. As Kippenberger's most ambitiously scaled
installation, the work was made towards the end of his career.

Kippenberger took as a starting point Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika

(written between 1911 and 1914 and published posthumously in 1927). The
books protagonist, Karl, is sent to the Amerika - the "promised land" of
opportunity - in search of redemption following a sexual transgression. Karl
experiences a series of bizarre adventures and comical encounters in Kafka's
fantastical land (the author never visited America). Though Karl's likely fate is
contested by Kafka scholars, Kippenberger installation offered an upbeat
ending: "a circus in town, looking to employ reliable hands, helpers, doers,
self-confident handlers and the like. Outside the circus tent there would be
tables and chairs set up for job interviews." With the artwork he hoped to create
the feeling of a friendly, communal space filled with employment opportunities
but, as with many of Kippenberger's artworks, the installation is layered with
references to work by other artists. Many of the furniture pieces are classics by
designers including Arne Jacobsen and Charles Eames, while the freestanding
elements are sculptures by Kippenberger and a number of his artist friends.
These have been interspersed with thrift store finds, thereby levelling the field
between artworks and commercially produced objects and thus continuing
Kippenberger's dedicated art/life project.
 As a teenager Kippenberger spent time living in several different creative
communes and this collaborative spirit stayed with him as his career developed.
This artwork celebrates one of the central tenets in Kippenberger's worldview -
an emphasis on community, conversation and the potency of working
collectively.

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 Fluxus movements. Beuys's diverse body of work
ranges from traditional media of drawing, painting, and sculpture, to
process-oriented, or time-based "action" art, the performance of which suggested
how art may exercise a healing effect (on both the artist and the audience) when it
takes up psychological, social, and/or political subjects. Beuys is especially famous
for works incorporating animal fat and felt, two common materials - one organic, the
other fabricated, or industrial - that had profound personal meaning to the artist.
They were also recurring motifs in works suggesting that art, common materials, and
one's "everyday life" were ultimately inseparable.

Accomplishments

​ 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 painting and sculpture (much
recently typified by Abstract Expressionism). Influenced in part by
contemporary experiments in music, such artists found themselves turning
away from the art world's prevailing commercialism in favor of "found" and
"everyday" items for creating ephemeral, time-based "happenings,"
impermanent installation art, and/or other largely action-oriented events.
​ 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 issues of the day). This is part of the
 meaning to be gleaned from his 1965 solo performance, How to Explain
Pictures to a Dead Hare, in which materials of personal significance (one foot
wrapped in felt, the cradling of a recently deceased animal) poetically suggest
the healing potential of art for a humanity seeking self revitalization and a
sense of renewed hope in the future (one should recall that Beuys came of
age in the immediate postwar period, when many Germans were just coming
to terms with many traumatic aspects of their recent past).
​ 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 attitude, or way of
conducting one's life, in every realm of daily activity. In this regard, Beuys's
work signals a new era in which art has increasingly become engaged with
social commentary and political activism.
​ 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/political behavior, and personal creativity
than any definition of everyday reality based on traditional standards of
"normalcy," or social codes of so-called "proper" conduct.

Important Art by Joseph Beuys

PROGRESSION OF ART

Artwork Images
1956-57
Woman/Animal Skull

This work on paper dates from Beuys's early experimental phase, which was
characterized by the artist's production of thousands of drawings under a
self-imposed program of aesthetic asceticism. Beuys worked at this time mostly
in solitude, as though under a strenuous search for self-enlightenment,
simultaneously seeking a new artistic language that would combine the spiritual
and the physical, the solid and the fluid, the ephemeral and the permanent.
Woman/Animal Skull suggests a melding of the rational and the instinctual, or of
the human and the animal minds out of a primordial state of organic chaos.

Oil pigment, ink, turpentine and pencil on paper - Collection of Heiga and Walther
Lauffs

Artwork Images
1964-85
Fat Chair

Fat Chair exemplifies how Beuys could turn two common materials of everyday
life - here the organic components of fat and wood - into a composite,
open-ended metaphor for the human body, its impermanent condition, and the
tendencies for social life to conform to constructed convention. Created in 1964
and encased in a glass, temperature-controlled museum display case, Fat Chair
subsequently underwent a slow, natural process of decay until 1985, by which
time the fat had almost entirely decomposed and virtually evaporated. Through
these basic organic compounds, viewers may well have imagined themselves
occupying this chair, thus endowing Fat Chair with the status of a "proxy" for
self-reflection on the transience of human life and the need to consciously and
expeditiously channel one's own organic and-alas-ephemeral energies.

Wood chair, animal fat - Estate of Joseph Beuys

Artwork Images
1965
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare

In this performance piece, Beuys could be viewed - his head and face covered in
honey and gold leaf - through a gallery's windows, a slab of iron tied to one boot,
a felt pad to the other, as the artist cradled a dead hare. As though carrying out a
strange music (if not some macabre bedtime story), Beuys frequently whispered
things to the animal carcass about his own drawings hanging on the walls
around him. Beuys would periodically vary the bleak rhythm of this scenario by
walking around the cramped space, one footstep muffled by the felt, the other
amplified by the iron. Every item in the room - a wilting fir tree, the honey, the felt,
and the fifty-dollars-worth of gold leaf - was chosen specifically for both its
symbolic potential as well as its literal significance: honey for life, gold for
wealth, hare as death, metal as conductor of invisible energies, felt as protection,
and so forth. As for most of his subsequent installations and performance work,
Beuys had created a new visual syntax not only for himself, but for all
conceptual art that might follow him.

Gold leaf, honey, dead hare, felt pad, iron, fir tree, miscellaneous drawings and
clothing items - Galerie Schmela, Dresden, Germany

Artwork Images
1966
Homogenous Infiltration for Grand Piano

In simply wrapping a grand piano in utilitarian grey felt, Beuys encased a

mammoth, sonic instrument normally employed for the creation of music, with a
"bandage" that essentially muted and muzzled it. Like most of his works, the title
reveals much of the idea behind it. "Homogenous" suggests that the composite
work is, or has recently become, a singular item, something formerly sundered
apart and healed, or made whole again. "Infiltration" may suggest one's desire to
penetrate the felt skin and restore the instrument back to the practical realm of
the everyday bourgeois living room, or recital hall. The entire ensemble (in the
manner of a visual "chamber music") relates back to the artist's own experience
after being shot out of the skies during war duties and the German nation's own
desperate aspiration for a new kind of postwar, collective composure.

Grand piano, felt - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Artwork Images
1969
The Pack

As though it were an oblique self-portrait, there is arguably no other work by

Beuys that is so intimately representative of the artist's healing fable by nomadic
Tartars during World War II. Tethered to the Volkswagon Bus - a sure sign of an
entire era of antiwar demonstration, international social upheaval, and
underlying global nuclear Cold War dread - are twenty sleds, each equipped with
what Beuys considered essential for personal survival of an unspecified (or
unanticipated) human or natural calamity. Perhaps even more important, the
sleds are exiting the bus, not being towed by it, as at first it may seem. This
suggests that each sled is an independent and sentient entity, here released (or
born) into the wild to find others in need of rescue.

Volkswagen Bus (1961), 20 wooden sleds, each equipped with fat, rolled-up felt
blanket, rope, flashlight, and leather belt - Staatliche Museen, Kassel, Germany

Artwork Images
1982-87
7000 Oaks: City Forestation Instead of City Administration

The subtitle of this work indicates that 7,000 Oaks was fundamentally a
time-based, or "process" work of environmentalism and eco-urbanization. Beuys
planted 7000 trees in the small, historic city of Kassel, Germany, over several
years (carried out with the assistance of volunteers), each oak accompanied by
a stone of basalt. Beuys's concerted effort to physically, spiritually and
metaphorically alter the city's social spaces - economic, political, and cultural,
among others - is what finally constituted a community-wide "social sculpture"
(Beuys's own terminology). 7000 Oaks officially began in 1982 at Documenta 7,
the international exhibition of modern and contemporary art that is organized, by
a guest curator, at Kassel every five years (since 1955). Beuys's own ecological
"happening" drew to an official close five years later, at Documenta 8, after being
continued by others for a full year after Beuys's own death.

7000 oak trees and 7000 basalt stones - Kassel, Germany