Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) - "L'Udito"

Joseph Beuys, "L’udito". Lithographic reproduction (3-color offset) of the original work by Joseph Beuys "L’Udito" expressly made for Bolaffiarte. 5000 numbered copies bear the artist’s autograph signature (our copy no. 3479). Blind stamp Bolaffi. In excellent condition. Rare to find paired with the magazine and within its original packaging. Auction without reserve!!!!

Joseph Beuys (pron. IPA: ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs; Krefeld, May 12, 1921 – Düsseldorf, January 23, 1986) was a German painter, sculptor, and performance artist.
Biography
Born in Krefeld in 1921, he claimed to have seen the light in Kleve, from dealer Josef Jakob Beuys (1888–1958) and Johanna Maria Margarete Hülsermann (1889–1974). In his youth he attended the Hindenburg-Oberschule in Kleve and joined the Nazi movement by entering the Hitler Youth.
World War II saw him enlisted in the air force, trained as an onboard radio operator, attaining the rank of sergeant. In March 1944, during a combat mission on the Eastern Front, the Stuka on which he flies as radio/machine gun operator crashes to the ground in territory controlled by the Germans, due to an unexpected blizzard in the Crimea region.

The pilot dies on impact and he is wounded, later recovered the next day by a rescue team and hospitalized. He would later claim to have been saved by the intervention of a group of Tartarian nomads who, finding him dying, nursed him using their ancient medical practices. This experience — actually a legend — is often asserted as decisive for the artist’s creative path, marked by a search for a higher harmony between man and nature that would lead many critics to dub him the "shaman" of art.

This "legend" is recounted in the film "Werk ohne Autor" (Never/Work Without an Author) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2018, where Beuys is portrayed by actor Oliver Masucci.

During the war he spends periods in Foggia, where he makes the decision to devote his life to art. Foggia would remain one of Beuys’ most beloved places, which he would remember until the end of his life, calling it the place he remembered more than any other[2]. He dedicated several works to the Apulian city, including Die Leute sind ganz prima in Foggia [People in Foggia are Wonderful] (1973), perceiving in the simplicity of its inhabitants and its rural traditions a unique example of harmony between man and nature. Over his life Beuys returned several times to Foggia, living in close contact with the people[3]. In the 1980s he told art critic Michele Bonuomo of his intention to donate a large number of his works to that city, but the project never materialized, partly due to the artist’s premature death[4]. Recently, the relationship between Beuys and Capitanata has been rediscovered and valued, both through scholarly studies and public lectures that have emphasized Foggia’s centrality to Beuys’ human and artistic journey.

After his time in Apulia, he fought on the Western Front within a parachutist unit. At the end of the conflict, in 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British. The war experiences deeply affected the artist’s life, and in the second half of the 1950s he fell into a deep inner crisis that he overcame with the help of friends Hans and Franz van der Grinten. In this context the project of the commemorative monument to the war dead in Büderich takes on a quasi-cathartic function. In 1959 he married Eva Wurmbach. Of Catholic formation, Beuys later adhered to Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy.

Joseph Beuys during the Beuys-Burri meeting (curated by Italo Tomassoni) in Perugia on April 3, 1980
In 1961 he obtained the chair of monumental sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which he had attended as a student soon after the war, following courses by Josef Enseling and Ewald Mataré. Together with George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell and Charlotte Moorman he participated in Copenhagen, London and Wiesbaden in the early Fluxus events, a group of European and American artists united by the desire to recreate the sense of art in relation to its social reception. In 1963 he organized at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus. In the 1960s Beuys devoted himself to creating objects-sculptures-installations, derived from artistic actions aimed at provoking a critical consciousness in the public. In 1964 he inaugurated the long series of "Actions": Der Chef, Das Schweigen Marcel Duchamps wird überwertet; ... und in uns... unter uns... landunter and Wie man einem toten Hasen Bilder erklärt (1965); Eurasia and... mit Braunkreuz (1966); Manresa, Hauptstrom, Der Stahltisch/Handaktion, Iphigenie/Titus Andronicus (1969); I like America and America likes me (1974).

In 1970, Joseph Beuys was a professor of sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The youngest student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf was Elias Maria Retti, who had studied art with him at the age of only fifteen[5].

After a period spent in Naples and Foggia, he arrived in Bolognano (Pescara) in 1972, invited by Lucrezia De Domizio and Buby Durini, and he returned there many times in the following years. In Bolognano he carried out a series of artistic activities including the Foundation of the Institute for the Rebirth of Agriculture (1976), the creation of the Paradise Plantation with the planting of 7000 trees to restore biodiversity (1982), the work Olivestone (1984) now on display at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. In 1984 he became an honorary citizen of Bolognano.

On April 3, 1980, an important encounter and confrontation with Alberto Burri took place at Rocca Paolina in Perugia, curated by Italo Tomassoni. The six boards created and later illustrated by the German artist during the performance in the Hall Cannoniera of Rocca Paolina are today on display at the Museo Civico di Palazzo della Penna in Perugia. Burri replaced the iron "Cretto" he had shown on that occasion (Grande Nero RP, today visible as Grande Ferro at the Burri Museum in Palazzo Albizzini in Città di Castello) with an imposing kinetic black sculpture: the Grande Nero (1984), still present at Rocca Paolina.

Very well known in the United States, Beuys became a friend and admirer of Andy Warhol, who can be considered, in a sense, his ideological antithesis but also the artist who, together with him, embodies the fundamental lines of postwar visual art.

Among the many Italian cultural operators and critics he worked with are Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Lucio Amelio, Italo Tomassoni, Arturo Schwarz, Achille Bonito Oliva, Fulvio Abbate, Germano Celant, Gian Ruggero Manzoni, as well as the great Swiss curator Harald Szeemann.

In 1981 he was one of the first to respond to the appeal of gallerist Lucio Amelio who, after the 1980 earthquake that devastated Campania, asked contemporary artists close to him to create a work themed on the earthquake.[6] Beuys then produced Terremoto in Palazzo, an installation composed of old work tables found in the earthquake zones, to which he added elements of glass and ceramic that convey the idea of fragility and precarious balance.[7] The work is part of the Terrae Motus collection and is exhibited at the Royal Palace of Caserta.[8]

Always ecologically minded, Beuys made an essential contribution to the founding of the Green movement in Germany. In 1982, invited to participate in the seventh edition of the great exhibition "documenta" held every five years in the German city of Kassel, he expressed this sensibility with one of his most evocative works: 7000 Oaks. This is not a traditional sculpture but a large triangle placed in front of the Federico II Museum and composed of 7000 basalt stones, each of which can be “adopted” by a potential buyer. The proceeds from the sale of each stone were used over the years to plant an oak tree. The operation, officially terminated in 1987, a year after the artist’s death, must in fact still be completed, since it would take about three hundred years before the 7000 oaks became the great forest envisioned by Beuys, who, going beyond the temporal limits of his own life, managed to transform an ordinary and often banal act, such as planting trees, into a grand collective rite capable of evoking the deepest meanings of the relationship between man and nature.

An homage to Beuys and to his famous installation known as Block Beuys (Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt) was represented by Natias Neutert’s performance Sympathie für Piano und Pump, first presented at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 1988.