Joseph Beuys


Selected Bibliography
Joseph Beuys. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979. Texts by Joseph Beuys and Caroline Tisdall. Joseph Beuys: Life and Works. Ed. Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnetz, and Karin Thomas. Trans. Patricia Lech. Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1979. Joseph Beuys: Skulpturen und Objekte. Ed. Heiner Bastian. Berlin: Martin Gropius Bau, in association with Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1988. Texts by Götz Adriani, Heiner Bastian, Franz Joseph van der Grinten, Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, Helmut Martin, Karin v. Maur, Thomas McEvilley, Theodora Vischer, and Armin Zweite. Joseph Beuys: Arena—where would I have got if I had been intelligent! Ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly. New York: Dia Center for the Arts, in association with Distributed Arts Publishers/D.A.P., New York, 1994. Texts by Lynne Cooke, Pamela Kort, and Christopher Phillips. Joseph Beuys: Drawings After the Codices Madrid of Leonardo da Vinci. Ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly. New York: Dia Center for the Arts, in association with Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1998. Texts by Lynne Cooke, Martin Kemp, Cornelia Lauf, and Ann Temkin. Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy. Ed. Gene Ray. Sarasota, Fla.: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, in association with Distributed Arts Publishers/D.A.P., New York, 2001. Texts by Lukas Beckmann, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Mel Chin, Pamela Kort, Kim Levin, Peter Nisbet, Gene Ray, Max Reithmann, and Joan Rothfuss, and an interview by Georg Jappe.


Biography
Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, Germany. He trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1947 to 1951, then taught there as a professor of sculpture from 1961 until his controversial dismissal, in 1972. Beuys's first one-person exhibition of his sculpture and drawings was in 1953, at the house of the collectors Franz Joseph and Hans van der Grinten. In the early 1960s he became involved with the Fluxus group, taking part in concerts and performances and devising his own "actions," which for a time became his principal aesthetic mode. In 1970 the Beuys Block—a large collection of Beuys's work formed under his own aegis from the Sammlung Karl Ströher—was installed in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt; it remains his most important public collection. Dia held exhibitions of Beuys's work in 1987, 1992, and 1998, and has planted trees and basalt columns in New York City as part of his 7000 Eichen, a project he began in 1982 for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, with initial funding from Dia Art Foundation. Beuys died in Düsseldorf in 1986.