Joseph Beuys

The exhibition of works by Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) – the most wide-ranging since the Beuys retrospective in the Martin Gropius-Bau Berlin (1988) – was installed by Harald Szeemann as a show of superlatives in the large exhibition hall, the parterre, and the graphics cabinet of the Kunsthaus. According to Szeemann, the display included all the works which could still be moved, with several room-filing environments, sculptures, wall panels and display cases, while more than four hundred drawings could be seen in the graphics cabinet. All his creative phases were exemplified. Ten years earlier, Beuys had appeared in the Kunsthaus for the first time with his work ‘Das Kapital’ (Capital) in the group exhibition ‘Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk’ (The tendency towards the total artwork, 1983). Then ‘Olivestone’ (1984), a significant work, also entered the permanent collection of the Kunsthaus – although at first, in 1992, as a loan from the Baronessa Lucrezia de Domizio Durini. Szeemann described Beuys as someone who aimed at the whole; his goal was no less than the liberation of humanity. Beuys’s idea of ‘social sculpture’, then, also aims at changing society, where humans participate as artists. He was striving for a sociey where freedom, equality, solidarity, and non-violence are central values. Not only was Beuys a mystic, visionary and messenger (Szeemann), but he also took an active part in politics: In 1979 he was co-founder of the ‘Sonstige Politische Vereinigung Die Grünen’ (Alternative Political Association The Greens), which one year later became Germany’s Green Party. Beuys remained a member of it until his death. In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Matthias Frehner celebrated Beuys as one who had supplied a diagnosis of his times in the 1980s like no other. He criticized the dense proximity of installations to each other in the large exhibition hall; he thought that robbed the works of their effect. The art critic Annelise Zwez, on the other hand, acknowledged that this same concentrated juxtaposition made an authentic experience possible (Aargauer Tagblatt). Afterwards, the spectacular show moved to Madrid (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia) and Paris (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou).