Biography of Joseph Beuys, examining his view that art is life and life is art and telling the story of his political campaign. The author suggests that his revolutionary performances and installations changed our perception of art in the last half of the 20th century.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
German avant-garde artist Beuys, who died in 1986, was a spiritual founder of the Green Party, darling of the international art world, utopian political activist and single-minded art professor who saw art as a source of regeneration, an antidote to "the schizophrenia of our age." His belief that art and life should flow into one another, a tenet of the neo-dadaist fluxus movement he helped organize, is reflected in his use of materials like fat, felt and honey, his shamanistic Action performances and his installations, sculptures and empathic animal drawings, according to the author. German art critic Stachelhaus also traces Beuys's unsuccessful 1979 bid for the European Parliament as Green Party candidate and his establishment of free universities across Europe. Although Beuys, wayfarer, democratic anarchist and visionary, remains an enigmatic figure, this intellectually stimulating biography shows that his art and political activism flowed from the same source. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Beuys is arguably the most important postwar European artist, yet he is not well known in America outside art circles. Even though he was incredibly prolific, this ignorance is understandable. More than most artists' works, Beuys's sketches and sculpture, performances and predigts "sermons" can only be interpreted through his highly personal semiotics and his "expanded concept of art," expressed simultaneously in his art. To facilitate our interpretation, Stachelhaus tries to blend biography with an analysis of the development of the artist's revolutionary social theory of art. Unfortunately, both suffer from a lack of continuity as characters and concepts alike are introduced and then dropped. As the only full-length English-language biography available, this book is recommended as a supplement to collections already containing catalogs of Beuys ' s work or to complement the artist's less encompassing but much more captivating direct addresses to his American audience collected in Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America; Writings by and Interviews with the Artist (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990). --Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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