Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys
Offset poster for Beuys' 1974 US lecture-series "Energy Plan for the Western Man", organised by Ronald Feldman Gallery - Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Born	May 12, 1921(1921-05-12) Krefeld, Germany
Died	January 23, 1986 (aged 64) Düsseldorf
Nationality	German
Field	Performances, sculpture, visual art, aesthetics, social philosophy
Training	Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Joseph Beuys (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs]; May 12, 1921, Krefeld – January 23, 1986, Düsseldorf) was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.

His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate, but he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Biography

Childhood and early life in the Third Reich (1921-1941)

Joseph Beuys was the son of the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys (1888 - 1958) and Johanna Maria Margarete Beuys (born Hülsermann, 1889 - 1974). The parents had moved from Geldern to Krefeld in 1910 and Beuys was born there on May 12. 1921. In autumn of that year the family moved to Kleve, an industrial town in the Lower Rhine region of Germany, close to the Dutch border. There, Joseph attended primary school (Katholische Volksschule) and secondary/high- school (Staatliches Gymnasium Cleve, now the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gymnasium). His teachers considered him to have a talent for drawing; he also took piano- and cello lessons. On several occasions he visited the studio of the Flemish painter and sculptor Achilles Moortgat. Other interests of note include Nordic history and mythology and especially the natural sciences. According to his own account, when the Nazi Party staged their book-burning in Kleve on May 19, 1933 in the courtyard of his school, he salvaged the book Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus "...from that large, flaming pile".^[1]

As of 1936, Beuys' membership in the Hitler Youth is documented; the organization comprised a large majority of German children and adolescents at that time and later that year membership became compulsory. He participated in the Nuremberg rally in September 1936, when he was 15 years old.^[2]

From an early age, Beuys displayed a keen interest in the natural sciences and had considered a career in medical studies, but in his last years of school - possibly influenced by pictures of Wilhelm Lehmbruck's sculptures^[3] - he had decided to become a sculptor himself. Around 1939 he worked for a circus on the side, postering and taking care of animals for about a year^[4]. He graduated from school in the spring of 1941 with his Abitur.

WW II (1941-1945)

In 1941, Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe.^[5] He began his military training as an aircraft radio operator in 1941, under the tutelage of Heinz Sielmann in Poznań (then "Posen") and they both attended lectures in Biology and Zoology at the University of Posen, at that time a Germanized University. It is also during this time that he began to seriously consider a career as an artist^{[citation needed]}.

In 1942 Beuys was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units. From 1943 on he was deployed as rear-gunner in the iconic Ju 87 "Stuka" dive-bomber, initially stationed in Königgrätz, later in the eastern Adriatic region. Drawings and sketches from that time have been preserved and already show his characteristic style.^[1] On 16 March 1944 Beuys’s plane was shot down on the Crimean Front and crashed close to Znamenka, (then "Freiberg"). Beuys’s subsequent recount (1979) of the event became one of the most controversial aspects of his artistic persona. He claimed having been rescued from the crash by nomadic Tatar tribesmen, who had wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health:

“Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them, and often wandered off to sit with them. ‘Du nix njemcky’ they would say, ‘du Tartar,’ and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital. So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in – I always preferred free movement to safety belts… My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact – there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying ‘Voda’ (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.” ^[6]

While apparent eyewitnesses acknowledge that the pilot died shortly after the crash, they note that Beuys was conscious, recovered by a German search commando, and there were no Tatars in the village at that time.^[7] Beuys was brought to a military hospital where he stayed for three weeks from March 17 to April 7.^[8] It is not inconsistent with Beuys' work that his biography would have been subject to his own reinterpretation;^[9] this particular story has served as a powerful myth of origins for Beuys’s artistic identity, as well as providing an initial interpretive key to his use of unconventional materials, amongst which felt and fat were central.

Despite prior injuries, he was deployed to the Western Front in August 1944, into a poorly equipped and trained paratrooper unit.^[1] He received the German Wound Badge in gold for being wounded in action more than five times. On the day after the German unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, Beuys was taken prisoner in Cuxhaven and brought to a British internment camp from which he was released August 5 of that year. He returned to his parents who had moved to a suburb of Kleve.

Studies and beginnings (1945-1960)

After his return to Kleve Beuys met the local sculptor Walter Brüx and painter Hanns Lamers, who encouraged him to take up art as a full-time career. He joined the Kleve Artists Association that had been established by Brüx and Lamers. On April 1, 1946 Beuys enrolled in the "Monumental Sculpture" program at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Initially assigned to the class of Joseph Enseling, with a traditional, representational focus^[1] he successfully applied to change his mentor after three semesters and joined the small class of Ewald Mataré in 1947, who had rejoined the academy the preceding year, after having been banned by the Nazis in 1939. The anthroposophic philosophy of Rudolf Steiner became an increasingly important basis for Beuys' reasoning, in his view it is: "... an approach that refers to reality in a direct and practical way, and that by comparison, all forms of epistemological discourse remain without direct relevance to current trends and movements".^[1] Reaffirming his interest in science, Beuys re-established contact with Heinz Sielmann and assisted with a number of nature- and wild-life documentaries in the region between 1947 and 1949.

In 1951, Mataré accepted Beuys into his master class.^[10] where he shared a studio with Erwin Heerich^(German) that he kept until 1954, a year after graduation. Nobel laureate Günter Grass recollects Beuys' influence in Mataré's class as shaping "a Christian anthroposophic atmosphere".^[11] He read Joyce, impressed by the "irish-mythological elements" in his works,^[1] the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schiller, and studied Galilei and Leonardo - who he admired as examples of artists and scientists who are conscious of their position in society and who work accordingly.^[1] Early shows include participations in the Kleve Artists Association annual exhibition in Kleve's Villa Koekkoek where Beuys showed aquarelles and sketches, a solo show at the home of Hans^(German) and Franz Joseph van der Grinten^(German) in Kranenburg and a show in the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal.

Beuys finished his education in 1953, graduating as master student from Mataré’s class, 32 years old at that time. He had a modest income from a number of crafts-oriented commissions: a gravestone and several pieces of furniture. Throughout the 1950s, Beuys struggled with a dire financial situation and with the trauma of his wartime experiences. His output consisted mainly of thousands of drawings, but he also produced some sculptures. Through his drawing practice, Beuys explored a range of unconventional materials and developed his artistic agenda, exploring metaphorical and symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems. Often difficult to interpret in themselves, these drawings constitute a speculative, contingent and rather hermetic exploration of the material world and how that world might be connected to the realm of myth and philosophy. In 1974, 327 drawings, the majority of which were made during the late 1940s and 1950s, were collected into a group entitled The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland (a reference to Joyce), and exhibited in Oxford, Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast.

In 1956, artistic self-doubt and material impoverishment led to a physical and psychological crisis, and Beuys entered a period of serious depression. He recovered at the house of his most important early patrons, the van der Grinten brothers, in Kranenburg. In 1958, Beuys participated in an international competition for an Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial, but his proposal did not win and his design was never realised. Also in 1958, Beuys begins a cycle of drawings related to Joyce’s Ulysses. Completed in ca.1961, the six exercise books of drawings would constitute, Beuys declared, an extension of Joyce’s seminal novel. In 1959 Beuys married Eva Wurmbach. They had two children together, Wenzel (born 1961) and Jessyka (born 1964).

Academia and public (1960 - 1975)

In 1961 Beuys was appointed professor of 'monumental sculpture' at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

What served to launch Beuys into the public consciousness was that which transpired following his performance at the Technical College Aachen in 1964. As part of a festival of new art coinciding with the 20th anniversary of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, Beuys created a performance or Aktion. The performance was interrupted by a group of students, one of whom attacked Beuys, punching him in the face. A photograph of the artist, nose bloodied and arm raised, was circulated in the media. It was for this 1964 festival that Beuys produced an idiosyncratic CV, which he titled Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Life Course/Work Course). The document was a self-consciously fictionalised account of the artist’s life, in which historical events mingle with metaphorical and mythical speech (he refers to his birth as the ‘Exhibition of a wound;’ he claims his Ulysses Extension to have been carried out ‘at James Joyce’s request’ – impossible, given that the writer was by 1961 long-dead). This document marks a blurring of fact and fiction that was to be characteristic of Beuys’s self-created persona, as well as the source of much controversy (although, significantly, there is no mention here of the famous plane crash).

Beuys manifested his social philosophical ideas in abolishing entry requirements to his Düsseldorf class. Throughout the late 1960s this renegade policy caused great institutional friction, which came to a head in October 1972, when Beuys was eventually dismissed from his post. The dismissal, which Beuys would not accept, produced a wave of protests from students, artists and critics. Although now bereft of an institutional position, Beuys continued a voracious schedule of public lectures and discussions, as well as becoming increasingly active in German politics.

National and international recognition (1975 - 1986)

The only major retrospective of Beuys work to be organised in Beuys’s lifetime opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1979. The exhibition has been described as a “lightning rod for American criticism,” eliciting as it did some powerful and polemical responses.^[12]

Death

Beuys died on January 23, 1986, in Düsseldorf, after a long illness.^[13]

Body of work

Homogeneous Infiltration for Piano 1966, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris

Beuys' extensive body of work principally comprises four domains: works of art in a traditional sense (painting, drawing, sculpture and installations), performance, contributions to the theory of art and academic teaching, and social- and political activities.

Artworks and performances

In 1962 Beuys befriended his Düsseldorf colleague Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus movement. This was the beginning of what was to be a brief formal involvement with Fluxus, a loose international group of artists who championed a radical erosion of the boundaries of art, bringing aspects of creative practice outside of the institution and into the everyday. Although Beuys participated in a number of Fluxus events, it soon became clear that he viewed the implications of art’s economic and institutional framework differently. Indeed, whereas Fluxus was directly inspired by the radical Dada activities emerging during the First World War, Beuys in 1964 broadcast (from Second German Television Studio) a rather different message: ‘Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet’ (‘The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated’). Beuys’s relationship with the legacy of Duchamp and the Readymade is a central (if often unacknowledged) aspect of the controversy surrounding his practice.

"How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" (performance, 1965)

Beuys Felt TV performance by Lothar Wolleh

Beuys’s first solo exhibition in a private gallery opened on November 26, 1965 with one of the artist’s most famous and compelling performances: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. The artist could be viewed through the glass of the gallery’s window. His face was covered in honey and gold leaf, an iron slab was attached to his boot. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, into whose ear he mumbled muffled noises as well as explanations of the drawings that lined the walls. Such materials and actions had specific symbolic value for Beuys. For example, honey was the product of bees who, for Beuys (following Rudolf Steiner), represented as ideal society of warmth and brotherhood. Gold had its importance within alchemical enquiry, and iron, the metal of Mars, stood for a masculine principle of strength and connection to the earth. A photograph from the performance, in which Beuys is sitting with the hare, has been described "by some critics as a new Mona Lisa of the 20th century," though Beuys did not agree with that.^[14]

Beuys produced many such spectacular, ritualistic performances, and he developed a compelling persona whereby he took on a liminal, shamanistic role, as if to enable passage between different physical and spiritual states. Further examples of such performances include: EURASIA (1965), Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony (1970), and I Like America and America Likes Me (1974).

"I Like America and America Likes Me" (performance, 1974)

Art historian Uwe Schneede considers this performance pivotal for the reception of German avantgarde art in the U.S.A., it paved the way for the recognition of Beuys' own work, but also that of contemporaries such as Lüpertz, Baselitz, Kiefer and many others in the 1980s.^[15] In May 1974 Beuys flew to New York and was taken by ambulance to the site of the performance, a room in the René Block Gallery on East Broadway. He shared this room with a wild coyote, for eight hours over three days. At times he stood, wrapped in a thick, grey blanket of felt, leaning on a large shepherd's staff. At times he lay on the straw, at times he watched the coyote as the coyote watched him and cautiously circled the man, or shredded the blanket to pieces, and at times he engaged in symbolic gestures, such as striking a large triangle or tossing his leather gloves to the animal; the performance continuously shifted between elements that were required by the realities of the situation, and elements that had purely symbolic character. At the end of the three days, Beuys hugged the coyote that had grown quite tolerant of him, and was taken to the airport. Again he rode in a veiled ambulance, leaving America without having set foot on its ground.^[15]

The concept of "Social Sculpture"

Some of the 7,000 Oaks planted between 1982 and 1987 for Documenta 7 (1982)

It was during the 1960s that Beuys formulated his central theoretical concepts concerning the social, cultural and political function and potential of art. Indebted to Romantic writers such as Novalis and Schiller, Beuys was motivated by a utopian belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident in the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change. These ideas were founded in the social ideas of anthroposophy and the work of Rudolf Steiner, of which he was a vigorous and original proponent. This translated into Beuys’s formulation of the concept of social sculpture, in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art (the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk) to which each person can contribute creatively (perhaps Beuys’s most famous phrase, borrowed from Novalis, is ‘Everyone is an artist’). In the video "Willoughby SHARP, Joseph Beuys, Public Dialogues (1974/120 min)", a record of Beuy's first major public discussion in the U.S., Beuys elaborates three principles: Freedom, Democracy, and Socialism, saying that each of them depends on the other two in order to be meaningful. In 1973, Beuys wrote:

“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.” ^[16]

In 1982 he was invited to create a work for Documenta 7. He delivered a large pile of basalt stones. From above one could see that the pile of stones was a large arrow pointing to a single oak tree that he had planted. He announced that the stones should not be moved unless an oak tree was planted in the new location of the stone. 7,000 oak trees were then planted in Kassel, Germany.^[17] This project exemplified the idea that a social sculpture was defined as interdisciplinary and participatory.

Political activities

Amongst other things, Beuys founded (or co-founded) the following political organisations: German Student Party (1967), Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum (1971), Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974), and German Green Party Die Grünen (1980). Beuys became a pacifist, was a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons and campaigned strenuously for environmental causes (indeed, he was elected a Green Party candidate for the European Parliament).

Critiques

One thing that the Guggenheim retrospective and its catalogue did was to afford an American critical audience a comprehensive view of Beuys’s practice and rhetoric. Whereas Beuys had been a central figure in the post-war European artistic consciousness for some time, American audiences had previously only had partial and fleeting access to his work. In 1980, and building on the scepticism voiced by Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, who in 1972 Open Letter had compared Beuys to Wagner,^[18] art historian Benjamin Buchloh (who was teaching at Staatliche Kunstakademie, just like Beuys) launched a polemically forceful attack on Beuys.^[19] The essay was (and remains) the most vitriolic and thoroughgoing critique of both Beuys’s rhetoric (referred to as “simple-minded utopian drivel”) and persona (Buchloh regards Beuys as both infantile and messianic).^[20]

Firstly, Buchloh draws attention to Beuys’s fictionalisation of his own biography^[21] , which he sees as symptomatic of a dangerous cultural tendency of dis-avowing a traumatic past and a retreat into the realms of myth and esoteric symbolism. Buchloh attacks Beuys for his failure to acknowledge and engage with Nazism, the Holocaust, and their implications. Secondly, Buchloh criticizes Beuys for displaying an inability or reluctance to engage with the consequences of the work of Marcel Duchamp. That is, a failure to acknowledge the framing function of the art institution and the inevitable dependence upon such institutions to create meaning for art objects. If Beuys championed art’s power to foster political transformation, he nevertheless failed to acknowledge the limits imposed upon such aspirations by the art museum and dealership networks that served somewhat less utopian ambitions. For Buchloh, rather than acknowledging the collective and contextual formation of meaning, Beuys instead attempted to prescribe and control the meanings of his art, and often in the form of dubious esoteric or symbolic codings. Buchloh’s critique has been developed by a number of commentators such as Stefan Germer and Rosalind Krauss.^[22]

Recuperations

Buchloh’s critique has been subject to revision. His attention is given to dismantling a mythologized artistic persona and utopian rhetoric, which he regarded to be irresponsible and even (it is implied) proto-fascist. Since Buchloh’s essay was written, however, a great deal of new archival material has come to light. Most significantly, Beuys’s proposal for an Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial, submitted in 1958. It has been claimed that the existence of such a project invalidates Buchloh’s claim that Beuys retreated from engaging with the Nazi legacy, a point that Buchloh himself has recently acknowledged, although the charges of romanticism and self-mythologizing remain.^[23]

Beuys’s charisma and eclecticism have polarised his audience. Beuys has attracted a huge number of admirers and devotees, the tendency of whom has been to uncritically accept Beuys’s own explanations as interpretive solutions to his work. In contrast, there are those who, following Buchloh, are relentlessly critical of Beuys’s rhetoric and use weaknesses in his argumentation to dismiss his work as bogus. Relatively few accounts have been concerned with an encounter with the works themselves, with exceptions arriving in the scholarship of art historians such as Gene Ray, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Briony Fer, Andy Wear, Alex Potts, and others. The drive here has been to wrest the potential of Beuys’s work away from the artist’s own rhetoric, and to further explore both the wider discursive formations within which Beuys operated (this time, productively), and the specific material properties of the works themselves.^[24]

Examples of contemporary artists who have drawn from the legacy of Beuys include AA Bronson, former member of the artists' collaborative General Idea, who, not without irony, adopts the subject position of the shaman to reclaim art's restorative, healing powers; Andy Wear (artist) whose installations are deliberately formed according to the Beuysian notion of 'stations' and are (in particular, referencing the Block Beuys in Darmstadt) essentially a constellation of works performed or created externally to the installation; and Peter Gallo, whose drawing cycle "I wish I could draw like Joseph Beuys" features stretches of Beuys's writings combined with images traced from vintage gay pornography onto found pieces of paper.

Exhibitions

• 1964 documenta, Kassel, Germany

• 1972 documenta, Kassel, Germany

• 1976 Venice Biennale, Italy

• 1979 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, U.S.

• 1980 Rocca Paolina, Perugia, Italy

• 1984 Seibu-Museum, Tokyo, Japan

• 2005 Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom 'Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments' [1]

• 2006 Museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

• 2006 The David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, U.S. Another View of Joseph Beuys

• 2007 Zwirner & Wirth , New York City, U.S. zwirnerandwirth.com

• 2007 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia - Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition (Joseph Beuys & Rudolf Steiner)

• 2008/2009 Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany - Beuys. We are the Revolution, Video at VernissageTV

• 2009 Museum of Modern Art - Focus on Joseph Beuys on Artabase

• 2009 Beuys is Here, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex [2]

Notes

References

• Ermen, Reinhard (2007) (in German). Joseph Beuys. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt. ISBN 3-499-50623-8. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Joseph Beuys

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Joseph Beuys

• FIU-Verlag: The editor of the Free International University (FIU) and events
• The Beuys Homepage by "Free International University"(FIU)
• Details of the 7000 oaks project
• Joseph Beuys Music on Ubuweb
• Walker Art Information Center
• Articles about Beuys
• Picture gallery
• The Social Sculpture Research Unit
• The Urban Forest Project (Our Tree)
• [3] introductory worksheets for use with kids and groups based on the works at Tate Modern
• Joseph Beuys Every man is an artist; Documenta Kassel (in Spanish)
• Joseph Beuys news and exhibition
• Joseph Beuys; Every man is an artist (in Spanish)
• Audio of Joseph Beuys "Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne", 1970, Mazzotta Editions, Milan, 33 rpm (excerpt 2:00) published on the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine @ Ubuweb
• (French) Joseph Beuys

Further reading

• Adriani, Götz, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas: Joseph Beuys: Life and Works. Trans. Patricia Lech. Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979.
• Bastian, Heiner: Joseph Beuys: The secret block for a secret person in Ireland. Text by Dieter Koepplin. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1988.
• Borer, Alain. The Essential Joseph Beuys. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.
• Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.: ‘Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol,’ Artforum, vol.5, no.18 (January 1980), pp. 35–43.
• Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., Krauss, Rosalind, Michelson, Annette: ‘Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim,’ in: October, 12 (Spring 1980), pp 3–21
• De Duve, Thierry: Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 1996.
• Murken, Axel Hinrich: Joseph Beuys und die Medizin. F. Coppenrath, 1979. ISBN 3-920192-81-8
• Oman Hiltrud: "Joseph Beuys. Die Kunst auf dem Weg zum Leben." München, Heyne (1998) ISBN 3-453-14135-0
• Potts, Alex: ‘Tactility: The Interrogation of Medium in the Art of the 1960s,’ Art History, Vol.27, No.2 April 2004. 282-304.
• Ray, Gene (ed.): Joseph Beuys, Mapping the Legacy. New York and Sarasota: D.A.P. 2001.
• Rosenthal, Mark: Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, London: Tate, 2005.
• Schneede, Uwe M. Joseph Beuys Die Aktionen. Gerd Hatje, 1998. ISBN 3-7757-0450-7
• Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.
• Temkin, Ann, and Bernice Rose. Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art). New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993.
• Tisdall, Caroline: Joseph Beuys, New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1979.