Joseph Beuys Was the 20th Century’s Most Influential Artist

Joseph Beuys was full of contradictions—in his art and in his life. Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1921, he enlisted in the Hitler Youth months before membership was mandatory. At 18, he worked in a circus, and two years later, he volunteered for the Nazi Air Force. After serving on the front lines of the wrong side of history, he crafted a public persona as Germany’s healer, identifying as a “shaman.” He died young, at 64, and is remembered as a leftist radical, even a naive utopian artist, as well as a founding member of the first Green Party. He helped usher in Germany’s Erinnerungskultur (“culture of remembrance”) and was dubbed by art historian Benjamin Buchloh the “first artist to address the history of fascism.” Beuys was a Nazi and then fashioned himself as a healer, stretching the saying “I contain multitudes” to the absolute limit.

Beuys never apologized, took responsibility, or even accounted for his role in the Nazi annihilation. Several artworks he made around the topic are marked by discomfiting ambiguity. His only public war monument, Memorial for the Dead of the World Wars (1958–59), is a troubling shape—a crucifix—and its title is glaringly vague. And though he was evasive about the Holocaust, when it came to cheerier topics, he was downright blunt, prone to hippie-dippy sloganeering. “Everyone is an artist” was his most famous line. For bright-eyed Beuys, this meant that everything could be art and, by extension, society could be remade. 

In hindsight, his utopianism clearly failed—at least if we take him at his word. But a convincing new book by the art historian Daniel Spaulding—Joseph Beuys and History, the first monographic study in English—suggests we shouldn’t, and instead proposes reading him as having acted in bad faith.

FOR SPAULDING, “THE PROBLEMS Beuys makes properly unbearable” are worth confronting head-on; his life and art emerge as synecdoche for the failures of modernism and the grappling that ensued. And “though sometimes taken for one,” Spaulding writes, “Beuys was not a fool.” His sculptures, like his persona, stage multiple, contradictory meanings. Flow and stasis coincide in sculptures Beuys called “batteries,” like Dia Beacon’s Fond III/3 (1979)—sheets of copper resting on stacks of felt. Copper conducts energy, and felt produces warmth through insulation, but it also blocks currents. This work is insistently material, but also metaphorically charged—Beuys’s signature. That trauma and healing recur in the form of lard can be traced back to Beuys’s self-mythologizing at its finest: After a wartime plane crash in Crimea, as his fable went, Tartar nomadswrapped him in fat and felt to keep him alive. Here, care is born from wreckage, even the wreckage of war, and his life is sustained by fat from bodies, presumably animal, now dead and dismembered. 

Some of Beuys’s dialectics are more disturbing still. Utopia meets dystopia, Germany’s past (the Holocaust) colliding with its idealized future—which Beuys envisioned as “free democratic socialism.” He thought it was both impossible and necessary for artists to speak to the horrors of modernity that the Holocaust epitomized. But since Auschwitz, as Beuys put it, could “never be represented in an image,” he offered positive counter-images instead. 

A prime example is his 1979 Guggenheim retrospective, which he described as an image of contemporary capitalism and a vision of a world yet to come. He says Utopia, but we see Holocaust, at least near the end of the show, where he exhibited a pile of felt suits followed by a rusted rail, Tram Stop (1961–76), and then a giant slab of fat, like remnants of a pile of bodies at the end of a train line.  

Here, Spaulding offers an interpretation he says “ought to be repellent”: Beuys’s doubling lays the Holocaust bare as a logical extension of capitalist modernity—the West’s attempt to organize the world into a hierarchical system, with accumulation sparing nothing, piling up even human bodies.If this sounds like a violent equivocation, it should: Spaulding calls it perhaps Beuys’s most outrageous proposition.And if it sounds like a metaphor, it is also material: the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) of the 1950s grew, quite literally, out of genocide. 

ALL THE DOUBLING MAKES Beuys a tricky figure. And it’s not clear how intentional it all was: Was his healer persona a clever conceptual act, or proof of his repression and self‑delusion? Probably both; and Spaulding does not—and presumably cannot—parse this out. Instead, he focuses on what the doubling does. Taken in good faith, Beuys’s evasive equivocating risked obstructing rather than enabling an honest reckoning with the past, Germany’s or his own. But it did something else too. Spaulding’s book centers around Beuys’s “economimeses,” a term borrowed from Derrida to describe how his work mimicked capital in order to critique it. Capital, after all, is an abstraction that mediates all social relations; Beuys wagered that art could also do this, and do it better. He made work attempting to prove this point. 

Where his contemporaries, like Andy Warhol, turned to commodities and readymades as capitalism’s metonyms, Beuys focused on capitalism as a system and on money as a mediator, signing bank notes and writing “Kunst = Kapital” (“Art = Capital”) on them. The postmodernism coming out of Warhol’s Factory was nihilistic, but Beuys’s PoMo held hope and horror simultaneously, distinguishing irreconcilable, contradictory meanings from total meaninglessness.

But why money? Society had been remade through economic intervention several times within Beuys’s lifetime. The Nazis exploited economic crisis to further fascism. Soon, Germany split along capitalist and communist lines. Then, a new currency—the deutsche mark—upended life once again, wiping out personal savings while also flooding shops with new goods. By the early ’70s, Nixon put an end to the system that backed global currencies with gold, reimagining money’s meaning and materials—sounds a bit like sculpture, no? Beuys thought so. Turning banknotes into artworks increased their value and proved his pithy point. 

Where both capital and art assign meaning to material things, according to Karl Marx, capitalism’s meaning-making is always doubled or split. Objects have use value as well as immaterial value, material reality mingling with affective attachments and symbolic charge. Beuys’s meanings, Spaulding argues, are similarly split; think of his battery, his fat, his Guggenheim installation. 

BEUYS WAS FASCINATED by totalizing systems—not just art and capital, but also nature. Spaulding deems him “the first artist … to make environmentalist concerns an integral part of his practice” and describes I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) as a small‑scale ecosystem: For three days, two species, a human (Beuys) and a coyote, lived in a closed loop of a room, augmented by inputs like straw, felt, food, and water, and outputs like feces and symbolism. 

Spaulding spends most of his book on Beuys’s ecological installation Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey Pump at the Workplace), 1977, which proposed a model society inspired by bees. It was installed only once, for documenta 6; later, at the Guggenheim, its components were decommissioned and displayed on the ground. In Kassel, a pump circulated honey through plastic tubes that snaked around the Museum Fridericianum. Beuys likened this honey to blood, but also to money: a substance whose circulation keeps a body or an economy alive.

Beuys—who had survived a heart attack two years earlier—described the pump as both a heart and a central bank. He said that money once functioned as a universal means of exchange, but now it flowed through central institutions that issued it in immaterial forms, like credit and debt. Honey promised something better: sweet sustenance produced by and for a collective. 

Spaulding critiques Honigpumpe’s utopianism, comparing it unfavorably to Pasolini’s sadomasochistic anti‑fascist film Saló (1975). Pasolini’s infamous coprophagia, Spaulding argues, disrupts the normal flow of biological systems, which stand in for social systems. Eating shit, in other words, swaps automatism for autonomy and offers a way out; Honigpumpe offers only a closed loop. 

But given its sticky, viscous quality, isn’t honey more likely to clog the system? It’s unclear from photos whether this happened at documenta 6, and few critics commented on Beuys’s installation at the time. But try sipping honey through a straw; it isn’t easy. Beuys may have said, “Honey is flowing,” but aren’t we to take his words in bad faith? After all, he also claimed his felt-and-copper works were batteries conducting spiritual energy. 

Abjection is, per its main theorist Julia Kristeva, anything that disturbs borders, systems, or rules—which is why for Spaulding, via Derrida, it is a form of freedom. In Beuys’s world, this freedom is essential: Where the Holocaust epitomized modernism’s abject failure to systematize humanity, art was proof that we could shape the world and act freely. Sticky substances are famously hard to contain neatly, to systematize. And while Spaulding notes that honey is bee regurgitation, he misses yet another of its more disturbing qualities: Honey is a natural antibiotic, death and healing rolled into one.

And what about the queen bee? Spaulding does not consider her; but Beuys did, at least cursorily, making wax reliefs in her image as early as 1952. The queen raises the question: Is a hive a worker’s utopia, or an authoritarian society?The doubling matters: Beuys’s criticsnote echoes of Nazism, pointing to his words rather than his work. The charge hinges on Beuys’s language of “social sculpture,” which bears an unsettling resemblance to a claim by Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “A statesman is also an artist. For him, the people is merely what stone is for a sculptor.” But the comparison is flimsy—one version is fascist (the Führer sculpts the people), the other communal (the people sculpt themselves). Which is it for the bees? Probably neither, since both “queen” and “hive-mind” are human metaphors.

And it’s metaphors that Spaulding relies on for apiary analogies, borrowing heavily from textual sources from the likes of Marx and Warhol. The move privileges language over materials—a familiar academic habit, though a surprising choice given the book’s brilliant account of the dissonance between metaphor and material under capitalism, and given its charge to compare Beuys’s work with his words. This, of course, is harder to do with a work the author could not have possibly seen installed, but still it’s worth considering that, with Honigpumpe, Beuys is smarter than he seems; Spaulding, after all, convincingly argues that we read him that way, that we “take [his] metaphors literally.”

Still, Spaulding is right to conclude that Beuys laid bare agonizing existential and political problems as the first step toward resolving them. And he is right to lament that since Beuys’s death, this thorny territory has “mostly been abandoned rather than worked through.” Social practice and relational aesthetics, he writes, offer neat and sanitized versions of Beuys’s legacy, focusing earnestly on solutions in an attempt to avoid his failures and complications. 

Any art history book that defends a morally compromised dead white man, never mind a former Nazi, is bound to be unfashionable. And yet, the timing of Joseph Beuys and History is sadly apt, because it forces readers who scoff at Beuys to look at themselves: What are you doing now, as fascism resurges and the climate collapses? Beuys flailed, but his blend of impotence and righteousness—as extreme and cringeworthy as it was—is also relatable. One only wishes that the contrast between his time and ours felt starker.