Wilhelm Lehmbruck (4 January 1881 – 25 March 1919) was a German sculptor . One of the most important of his generation, he was influenced by realism and expressionism .
146-684: Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( / b ɔɪ s / BOYSS , German: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs] ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism , sociology. With Heinrich Böll , Johannes Stüttgen [ de ; fr ] , Caroline Tisdall, Robert McDowell, and Enrico Wolleb, Beuys created the Free International University for Creativity & Interdisciplinary Research (FIU). Through his talks and performances, he also formed The Party for Animals and The Organisation for Direct Democracy. He
292-413: A machine learning approach, where large numbers of manually rated photographs are used to "teach" a computer about what visual properties are of relevance to aesthetic quality. A study by Y. Li and C. J. Hu employed Birkhoff's measurement in their statistical learning approach where order and complexity of an image determined aesthetic value. The image complexity was computed using information theory while
438-413: A subject -based, inductive approach. The analysis of individual experience and behaviour based on experimental methods is a central part of experimental aesthetics. In particular, the perception of works of art, music, sound, or modern items such as websites or other IT products is studied. Experimental aesthetics is strongly oriented towards the natural sciences . Modern approaches mostly come from
584-406: A work of art ), while artistic judgment refers to the recognition, appreciation or criticism of art in general or a specific work of art . In the words of one philosopher, "Philosophy of art is about art. Aesthetics is about many things—including art. But it is also about our experience of breathtaking landscapes or the pattern of shadows on the wall opposite your office. Philosophers of art weigh
730-411: A Renaissance Madonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions. "Rules of composition" that might be read into Duchamp 's Fountain or John Cage 's 4′33″ do not locate the works in a recognizable style (or certainly not a style recognizable at the time of the works' realization). Moreover, some of Dutton's categories seem too broad:
876-471: A career in medical studies, but in his last years of school he became interested in pursuing a career in sculpture, possibly influenced by pictures of Wilhelm Lehmbruck 's sculptures. In around 1939 he began working part-time at a circus, where his responsibilities included posturing and taking care of animals. He held the job for about a year. He graduated from school in the spring of 1941, having successfully earned his Abitur . Although he finally opted for
1022-565: A career in medicine, in 1941, Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe , and began training as an aircraft radio operator under the tutelage of Heinz Sielmann in Posen, Poland (now Poznań ). They both attended lectures on biology and zoology at the University of Posen , at that time a Germanized university . During this time he began to consider pursuing a career as an artist. In 1942, Beuys
1168-423: A culturally contingent conception of art versus one that is purely theoretical. They study the varieties of art in relation to their physical, social, and cultural environments. Aesthetic philosophers sometimes also refer to psychological studies to help understand how people see, hear, imagine, think, learn, and act in relation to the materials and problems of art. Aesthetic psychology studies the creative process and
1314-445: A dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality. The problem lies in the word 'understanding' and its many levels, which cannot be restricted to rational analysis. Imagination, inspiration, and longing all lead people to sense that these other levels also play a part in understanding. This must be the root of reactions to this action, and is why my technique has been to try and seek out
1460-479: A dead hare with his head covered with honey and gold leaf, and Ulmer argues not only that the honey on the head but the hare itself are models of thinking, of man embodying his ideas in forms. Contemporary movements such as performance art may be considered 'laboratories' for a new pedagogy since "research and experiment have replaced form as the guiding force". During an Artforum interview with Willoughby Sharp in 1969, Beuys added to his famous statement – "teaching
1606-423: A direct and practical way, and that by comparison, all forms of epistemological discourse remain without direct relevance to current trends and movements." Reaffirming his interest in science, Beuys re-established contact with Heinz Sielmann , and assisted with a number of nature- and wildlife documentaries in the region between 1947 and 1949. In 1947 Beuys, along with other artists (including Hann Trier ), founded
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#17327798774271752-422: A discussion about the tragedy surrounding Thalidomide children. Beuys also prepared Infiltration Homogens for Cello , a cello wrapped in grey felt with a red cross attached, for musician Charlotte Moorman , who performed it in conjunction with Nam June Paik . Caroline Tisdall noted how, in this work, "sound and silence, exterior and interior, are ... brought together in objects and actions as representatives of
1898-470: A facsimile/copy). Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. What a thing means or symbolizes is often what is being judged. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th-century thinkers. The point
2044-469: A group of researchers at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. The tool predicted aesthetics based on the values of narrative elements. A relation between Max Bense 's mathematical formulation of aesthetics in terms of "redundancy" and "complexity" and theories of musical anticipation was offered using the notion of Information Rate. Evolutionary aesthetics refers to evolutionary psychology theories in which
2190-432: A host of supporting notions encompassing cultural and political concepts, Beuys crafted a charismatic artistic persona that infused his work with mystical overtones and led him to be called "shaman" and "messianic" in the popular press." Beuys had adopted shamanism not only as a presentation mode of his art but also in his own life. Although the artist as a shaman has been a trend in modern art ( Picasso , Gauguin ), Beuys
2336-538: A large triangle or tossing his leather gloves to the animal; the performance continuously shifted between elements that were required by the realities of the situation and elements that had a purely symbolic character. At the end of the three days, Beuys hugged the coyote that had grown quite tolerant of him and was taken to the airport. Again he rode in a veiled ambulance, leaving America without having set foot on its ground. As Beuys later explained: 'I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than
2482-484: A man "if he says that ' Canary wine is pleasant,' he is quite content if someone else corrects his expression and remind him that he ought to say instead: 'It is pleasant to me ,'" because "every one has his own [ sense of] taste ". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "pleasantness" because "if he gives out anything as beautiful, he supposes in others the same satisfaction—he judges not merely for himself, but for every one, and speaks of beauty as if it were
2628-542: A military hospital in Berlin. The suffering and misery he saw there are reflected in his late sculptures such as Fallen Man (1915–16). He suffered from severe depression and fled the war by going to Zürich at the end of 1916. There he made contact with the socialist, L. Rubiner, who collaborated on Franz Pfemfert 's Die Aktion . He was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in early 1919. After
2774-477: A more traditional, representational focus, but he managed to change his mentor after three semesters, joining the small class of Ewald Mataré in 1947, who had rejoined the academy the previous year, after having been banned by the Nazis in 1939. The anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner became an increasingly important basis for Beuys's philosophy. In his view it is "...an approach that refers to reality in
2920-513: A new direction. At the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, Beuys did not impose his artistic style or techniques on his students; in fact, he kept much of his work and exhibitions hidden from the classroom because he wanted his students to explore their own interests, ideas, and talents. Beuys's actions were somewhat contradictory: while he was extremely strict about certain aspects of classroom management and instruction, such as punctuality and
3066-428: A parable of cultural work in a public medium. The authority of those who dare — or are so bold as — to speak publicly results from the fact that they isolate themselves from the gaze of the public, under the gaze of the public, in order to still address it in indirect speech, relayed through a medium. What is constituted in this ceremony is authority in the sense of authorship, in the sense of a public voice....Beuys stages
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#17327798774273212-546: A particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art. Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari . Walter Benjamin echoed Malraux in believing aesthetics
3358-613: A philosophical rationale for peace education . Beauty is one of the main subjects of aesthetics, together with art and taste . Many of its definitions include the idea that an object is beautiful if perceiving it is accompanied by aesthetic pleasure . Among the examples of beautiful objects are landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty is a positive aesthetic value that contrasts with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Different intuitions commonly associated with beauty and its nature are in conflict with each other, which poses certain difficulties for understanding it. On
3504-510: A physical and psychological crisis, and Beuys entered a period of serious depression. He recovered at the house of his most important early patrons, the van der Grinten brothers, in Kranenburg. In 1958, Beuys participated in an international competition for an Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial. His proposal did not win and his design was never realised. In 1958, Beuys began a cycle of drawings related to Joyce's Ulysses . Completed in around 1961,
3650-433: A physicist might entertain hypothetical worlds in his/her imagination in the course of formulating a theory. Another problem is that Dutton's categories seek to universalize traditional European notions of aesthetics and art forgetting that, as André Malraux and others have pointed out, there have been large numbers of cultures in which such ideas (including the idea "art" itself) were non-existent. Aesthetic ethics refers to
3796-422: A piece of art. In this field, aesthetics is not considered to be dependent on taste but is a matter of cognition, and, consequently, learning. In 1928, the mathematician George David Birkhoff created an aesthetic measure M = O / C {\displaystyle M=O/C} as the ratio of order to complexity. In the 1960s and 1970s, Max Bense , Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake were among
3942-446: A play, watching a fashion show, movie, sports or exploring various aspects of nature. The philosophy of art specifically studies how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize art. Aesthetics considers why people like some works of art and not others, as well as how art can affect our moods and our beliefs. Both aesthetics and the philosophy of art try to find answers to what exactly
4088-548: A property of things." Viewer interpretations of beauty may on occasion be observed to possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of an education process and awareness of elite cultural values learned through exposure to mass culture . Bourdieu examined how the elite in society define the aesthetic values like taste and how varying levels of exposure to these values can result in variations by class, cultural background, and education. According to Kant, beauty
4234-580: A solo show at the home of Hans [ de ] and Franz Joseph van der Grinten [ de ] in Kranenburg as well as a show in the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal . Beuys finished his education in 1953, graduating at age 32 as master student from Mataré's class. He had a modest income from a number of craft-oriented commissions: a gravestone and several pieces of furniture. Throughout
4380-522: A speculative, contingent and hermetic exploration of the material world, myth and philosophy. In 1974, 327 drawings, the majority of which were made during the late 1940s and 1950s, were collected into a group entitled The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland (a reference to Joyce), and exhibited in Oxford, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Belfast. In 1956, artistic self-doubt and material impoverishment led to
4526-422: A strategic stage to use the shaman's character but, subsequently, I gave scientific lectures. Also, at times, on one hand, I was a kind of modern scientific analyst, on the other hand, in the actions, I had a synthetic existence as shaman. This strategy aimed at creating in people an agitation for instigating questions rather than for conveying a complete and perfect structure. It was a kind of psychoanalysis with all
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4672-453: A strong critic of environmental destruction. He said at the time, "I don't use shamanism to refer to death, but vice versa – through shamanism, I refer to the fatal character of the times we live in. But at the same time I also point out that the fatal character of the present can be overcome in the future." The only major retrospective of Beuys work to be organised in Beuys's lifetime opened at
4818-584: A suburb of Kleve . After returning to Kleve , Beuys met local sculptor Walter Brüx and painter Hanns Lamers, who encouraged him to take up art as a full-time career. He joined the Kleve Artists Association, which had been established by Brüx and Lamers. On 1 April 1946, Beuys enrolled in the monumental sculpture program at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts . Initially he was assigned to the class of Joseph Enseling , who had
4964-540: A wave of protests from students, artists and critics. Although now without an institutional position, Beuys continued an intense schedule of public lectures and discussions, and became increasingly active in German politics. Despite this dismissal, the walkway on the academy's side of the Rhine is named for Beuys. Later in life, Beuys became a visiting professor at various institutions (1980–1985). "The most important discussion
5110-408: A work, though possibly of interest in themselves, have no bearing on the correct interpretation of the work." Gaut and Livingston define the intentionalists as distinct from formalists stating that: "Intentionalists, unlike formalists, hold that reference to intentions is essential in fixing the correct interpretation of works." They quote Richard Wollheim as stating that, "The task of criticism
5256-533: Is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo . Croce suggested that "expression"
5402-563: Is already made by Hume , but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic's Judgment", in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics , 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behaviour, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory
5548-443: Is an explanation for his adopting materials such as felt and fat. Beuys experienced severe depression between 1955 and 1957. After recovering, he observed at the time that "his personal crisis" caused him to question everything in life, and he called the incident "a shamanistic initiation." He saw death not only in its inevitability for people, but also death in the environment, and through his art and his political activism, he became
5694-472: Is art and what makes good art. The word aesthetic is derived from the Ancient Greek αἰσθητικός ( aisthētikós , "perceptive, sensitive, pertaining to sensory perception"), which in turn comes from αἰσθάνομαι ( aisthánomai , "I perceive, sense, learn") and is related to αἴσθησις ( aísthēsis , "perception, sensation"). Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start with
5840-427: Is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central. George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities. Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society. Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting
5986-696: Is employed. A third major topic in the study of aesthetic judgments is how they are unified across art forms. For instance, the source of a painting's beauty has a different character to that of beautiful music, suggesting their aesthetics differ in kind. The distinct inability of language to express aesthetic judgment and the role of social construction further cloud this issue. The philosopher Denis Dutton identified six universal signatures in human aesthetics: Artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn have indicated that there are too many exceptions to Dutton's categories. For example, Hirschhorn's installations deliberately eschew technical virtuosity. People can appreciate
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6132-493: Is epistemological in character," stated Beuys, demonstrating his desire for continuous intellectual exchange. Beuys attempted to apply philosophical concepts to his pedagogical practice. Beuys's action, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare , exemplifies a performance that is especially relevant to the pedagogical field because it addresses "the difficulty of explaining things". The artist spent three hours explaining his art to
6278-442: Is for it to cause disinterested pleasure. Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude towards them or of their function. During the first half of the twentieth century, a significant shift to general aesthetic theory took place which attempted to apply aesthetic theory between various forms of art, including the literary arts and the visual arts, to each other. This resulted in
6424-585: Is known for his "extended definition of art" in which the ideas of social sculpture could potentially reshape society and politics. He frequently held open public debates on a wide range of subjects, including political, environmental, social, and long-term cultural issues. Beuys' social sculpture proposals and underpinning ideas have been extensively explored, shared and developed through the practices, pedagogies, actions and writings of his master student and collaborator Shelley Sacks, first in South Africa in
6570-456: Is marked by the two red crosses signifying emergency: the danger that threatens if we stay silent and fail to make the next evolutionary step...Such an object is intended as a stimulus for discussion, and in no way is to be taken as an aesthetic product." During the performance he also used wax earplugs and drew and wrote on a blackboard. The piece is subtitled "The greatest composer here is the thalidomide child", and attempts to bring attention to
6716-409: Is my greatest work of art" – that "the rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren't very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it." Beuys saw his role of an artist as a teacher or shaman who could guide society in
6862-445: Is not to produce honey, but to think, to produce ideas. In this way the deathlike character of thinking becomes lifelike again. For honey is undoubtedly a living substance. Human thinking can be lively too. But it can also be intellectualized to a deadly degree, and remain dead, and express its deadliness in, say, the political or pedagogic fields. Gold and honey indicate a transformation of the head, and therefore, naturally and logically,
7008-472: Is overrated'). Beuys's relationship with the legacy of Duchamp and the readymade is a central (if often unacknowledged) aspect of the controversy surrounding his practice. On 12 January 1985, Beuys, together with Andy Warhol and Kaii Higashiyama , became involved in the "Global-Art-Fusion" project. This was a fax art project, initiated by the conceptual artist Ueli Fuchser, in which faxes with drawings of all three artists were sent within 32 minutes around
7154-499: Is sometimes equated with truth. Recent research found that people use beauty as an indication for truth in mathematical pattern tasks. However, scientists including the mathematician David Orrell and physicist Marcelo Gleiser have argued that the emphasis on aesthetic criteria such as symmetry is equally capable of leading scientists astray. Computational approaches to aesthetics emerged amid efforts to use computer science methods "to predict, convey, and evoke emotional response to
7300-422: Is subjective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone. In the opinion of Władysław Tatarkiewicz , there are six conditions for the presentation of art: beauty, form, representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression and innovation. However, one may not be able to pin down these qualities in a work of art. The question of whether there are facts about aesthetic judgments belongs to
7446-532: Is the reconstruction of the creative process, where the creative process must in turn be thought of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of art itself." A large number of derivative forms of aesthetics have developed as contemporary and transitory forms of inquiry associated with the field of aesthetics which include the post-modern, psychoanalytic, scientific, and mathematical among others. Early-twentieth-century artists, poets and composers challenged existing notions of beauty, broadening
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#17327798774277592-488: Is unusual in that respect as he integrated "his art and his life into the shaman role." Beuys believed that humanity, with its turn on rationality, was trying to eliminate emotions and thus eliminate a major source of energy and creativity. In his first lecture tour in America he espoused that humanity was in an evolving state and that as "spiritual" beings we ought to draw on both our emotions and our thinking as they represent
7738-488: Is usually defined as 'primitive' art, or un-harmonious, non-cathartic art, camp art, which 'beauty' posits and creates, dichotomously, as its opposite, without even the need of formal statements, but which will be 'perceived' as ugly. Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw
7884-587: The Crimean Front close to Znamianka, then Freiberg Krasnohvardiiske Raion . Drawing from this incident, Beuys fashioned the myth that he was rescued from the crash by nomadic Tatar tribesmen , who wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health: "Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man's land between
8030-794: The Folkwang Museum in Hagen, with Egon Schiele . In 1914, he had his first solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie Levesque. He contributed to an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris . From 1910–1914 he lived in Paris. He frequented the Café du Dôme , where he met sculptors such as Modigliani , Brâncuși , and Archipenko . During World War I he served as a paramedic at
8176-615: The Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1979. The exhibition has been described as a "lightning rod for American criticism," eliciting as it did some powerful and polemical responses. Beuys died of heart failure on 23 January 1986, in Düsseldorf . Beuys's extensive body of work principally comprises four domains: works of art in a traditional sense (painting, drawing, sculpture and installations), performance, contributions to
8322-814: The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting from 1901 to 1906. On leaving the academy Lehmbruck worked as an independent artist in Düsseldorf. He exhibited for the first time at the Deutsche Kunstausstellung, in Cologne in 1906. He was impressed by the sculptures of Auguste Rodin , and traveled to England, Italy, the Netherlands, and Paris. In 1907, he married Anita Kaufmann, and they had three sons. In 1912, Lehmbruck exhibited in
8468-513: The awe inspired by a sublime landscape might physically manifest with an increased heart-rate or pupil dilation. As seen, emotions are conformed to 'cultural' reactions, therefore aesthetics is always characterized by 'regional responses', as Francis Grose was the first to affirm in his Rules for Drawing Caricaturas: With an Essay on Comic Painting (1788), published in W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, Bagster, London s.d. (1791? [1753]), pp. 1–24. Francis Grose can therefore be claimed to be
8614-412: The entropy , which assigns higher value to simpler artworks. In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty. This theory takes the subjectivity of the observer into account and postulates that among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the most aesthetically pleasing is the one that is encoded by the shortest description, following
8760-534: The "Irish-mythological elements" in his works, the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schiller , and studied Galileo and Leonardo , whom he admired as examples of artists and scientists who are conscious of their position in society and who work accordingly. Early shows include participation in the Kleve Artists Association annual exhibition in Kleve's Villa Koekkoek , where Beuys showed aquarelles and sketches,
8906-475: The "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect. Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty , Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing. The relation of Marxist aesthetics to post-modern aesthetics is still a contentious area of debate. The field of experimental aesthetics was founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 19th century. Experimental aesthetics in these times had been characterized by
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#17327798774279052-399: The "full field" of aesthetics is broad, but in a narrow sense it can be limited to the theory of beauty, excluding the philosophy of art. Aesthetics typically considers questions of beauty as well as of art. It examines topics such as art works, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic experience refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object (not necessarily
9198-404: The 'Exhibition of a wound;' he claims his Ulysses Extension to have been carried out 'at James Joyce's request' – impossible, given that the writer was long dead by 1961). This document marks a blurring of fact and fiction that was to be characteristic of Beuys' self-created persona. Beuys manifested his social philosophical ideas in abolishing entry requirements to his Düsseldorf class. Throughout
9344-400: The 1950s, Beuys struggled both financially and from the trauma of his wartime experiences. His output consisted of drawings and sculptural work. Beuys explored a range of unconventional materials and developed his artistic agenda, exploring metaphorical and symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems. Often difficult to interpret in themselves, his drawings constitute
9490-874: The 1970s as a branch of the Free International University (FIU); in the first Social Sculpture Colloquium, hosted by the Goethe Institute in Glasgow (1995); from 1997-2018 as Professor in Social Sculpture in the Social Sculpture Research Unit (SSRU) at Oxford Brookes University, where Johannes Stüttgen, Caroline Tisdall and Volker Harlan were research fellows; and since 2021, through the Social Sculpture Lab, curated by Sacks and hosted by
9636-625: The Documenta Archive in 2021 for the Beuys Centenery. The Social Sculpture Lab continues to engage with, develop and share Beuys' social sculpture understandings through such initiatives as the 7000 HUMANS Global Social Forest,. which has close connections with Beuys' 7000 Oaks, Sacks' social sculpture-connective practice methodologies, and a growing network of Social Sculpture Hubs in Germany, India, Holland, Brazil and UK. Beuys
9782-830: The Dutch border. Beuys attended primary school at the Katholische Volksschule and secondary school at the Staatliches Gymnasium Cleve (now the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gymnasium ). While in school he developed skills in drawing and took lessons in piano and cello. Other interests included the natural sciences, as well as Nordic history and mythology. By his own account, when the Nazi Party staged their book-burning in Kleve on 19 May 1933 in his school courtyard, he salvaged
9928-408: The German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital. So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting
10074-467: The Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them and often wandered off to sit with them. 'Du nix njemcky' they would say, 'du Tartar,' and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet, it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when
10220-434: The action that most captured people's imaginations. On one level this must be because everyone consciously or unconsciously recognizes the problem of explaining things, particularly where art and creative work are concerned, or anything that involves a certain mystery or question. The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. Then, as I said, even
10366-407: The aesthetic experience. Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds. Aesthetics examines affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Judgements of aesthetic value rely on the ability to discriminate at a sensory level. However, aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination. For David Hume , delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all
10512-423: The ambulance stretcher swathed in felt. He shared this room with a coyote for eight hours over three days. At times he stood, wrapped in a thick, grey blanket of felt, leaning on a large shepherd's staff. At times he lay on the straw, at times he watched the coyote as the coyote watched him and cautiously circled the man or shredded the blanket to pieces, and at times he engaged in symbolic gestures, such as striking
10658-410: The artist. In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled " The Intentional Fallacy ", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention , or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside
10804-586: The basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success. One example being that humans are argued to find beautiful and prefer landscapes which were good habitats in the ancestral environment. Another example is that body symmetry and proportion are important aspects of physical attractiveness which may be due to this indicating good health during body growth. Evolutionary explanations for aesthetical preferences are important parts of evolutionary musicology , Darwinian literary studies , and
10950-614: The book Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus "... from that large, flaming pile". In 1936, Beuys was a member of the Hitler Youth ; the organization at that time included a large majority of German children and adolescents, and later that year membership became compulsory. He participated in the Nuremberg rally in September 1936. He was 15 years old at the time. Given his early interest in natural sciences, Beuys had considered
11096-642: The boundaries of the (art) system and opening it up to multiple possibilities, bringing creativity into all areas of life. His nontraditional and anti-establishment pedagogical practice and philosophy made him the focus of much controversy, and to battle the policy of "restricted entry", under which only a few select students were allowed to attend art classes, he deliberately allowed students to over-enroll in his courses (Anastasia Shartin), true to his belief those who have something to teach and those who have something to learn should come together. According to Cornelia Lauf (1992), "in order to implement his idea, as well as
11242-455: The brain and our understanding of thought, consciousness and all the other levels necessary to explain pictures to a hare: the warm stool insulated with felt ... and the iron sole with the magnet. I had to walk on this sole when I carried the hare round from picture to picture, so along with the strange limp came the clank of iron on the hard stone floor—that was all that broke the silence, since my explanations were mute .... This seems to have been
11388-580: The branch of metaphilosophy known as meta-aesthetics . Aesthetic judgment is closely tied to disgust . Responses like disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions including physiological responses like the gag reflex . Disgust is triggered largely by dissonance ; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting. Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in physical reactions. For example,
11534-631: The coyote.' In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked I Like America and America Likes Me the second greatest work of performance art ever, after Pandrogeny by Genesis P-Orridge . Richard Demarco invited Beuys to Scotland in May 1970 and again in August to show and perform in the Edinburgh International Festival with Günther Uecker , Blinky Palermo and other Düsseldorf artists plus Robert Filliou where they took over
11680-580: The creation of such a public voice as an event that is as dramatic as it is absurd. He thus asserts the emergence of such a voice as an event. At the same time, however, he also undermines this assertion through the lamentably powerless form by which this voice is produced: in emitting half-smothered inarticulate sounds that would have remained inaudible without electronic amplification." Lana Shafer Meador wrote: "Inherent to The Chief were issues of communication and transformation .... For Beuys, his own muffled coughs, breaths, and grunts were his way of speaking for
11826-634: The direction of previous approaches. Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between that which is beautiful and that which is interesting , stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. He supposes that every observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of their observations by identifying regularities like repetition, symmetry , and fractal self-similarity . Since about 2005, computer scientists have attempted to develop automated methods to infer aesthetic quality of images. Typically, these approaches follow
11972-578: The discovery of creativity in everyday life, and the belief that "everyone [was] an artist." Beuys himself encouraged peripheral activity and all manner of expression to emerge during the course of these discussions. While some of Beuys's students enjoyed the open discourse of the Ringgesprache , others, including Palermo and Immendorf, disapproved of the classroom disorder and anarchic characteristics, eventually rejecting his methods and philosophies altogether. Beuys also advocated taking art outside of
12118-619: The energy points in the human power field, rather than demanding specific knowledge or reactions on the part of the public. I try to bring to light the complexity of creative areas." Beuys produced many such spectacular, ritualistic performances, and he developed a compelling persona whereby he took on a liminal, shamanistic role, as if to enable passage between different physical and spiritual states. Further examples of such performances include: Eurasienstab [ de ] (1967), Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony (1970), and I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). The Chief
12264-650: The everyday. Although Beuys participated in a number of Fluxus events, it soon became clear that he viewed the implications of art's economic and institutional framework differently. Indeed, whereas Fluxus was directly inspired by the radical Dada activities emerging during the First World War, Beuys in a 1964 broadcast (from the Second German Television Studio) a different message: Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet [ de ] ('The silence of Marcel Duchamp
12410-413: The face. A photograph of the artist, nose bloodied and arm raised, was circulated in the media. It was for this 1964 festival that Beuys produced an idiosyncratic CV , which he titled Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Life Course/Work Course). The document was a self-consciously fictionalised account of the artist's life, in which historical events mingle with metaphorical and mythical speech (he refers to his birth as
12556-630: The fields of cognitive psychology ( aesthetic cognitivism ) or neuroscience ( neuroaesthetics ). Mathematical considerations, such as symmetry and complexity , are used for analysis in theoretical aesthetics. This is different from the aesthetic considerations of applied aesthetics used in the study of mathematical beauty . Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth , outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth have been argued to be nearly synonymous, as reflected in
12702-489: The first critical 'aesthetic regionalist' in proclaiming the anti-universality of aesthetics in contrast to the perilous and always resurgent dictatorship of beauty. 'Aesthetic Regionalism' can thus be seen as a political statement and stance which vies against any universal notion of beauty to safeguard the counter-tradition of aesthetics related to what has been considered and dubbed un-beautiful just because one's culture does not contemplate it, e.g. Edmund Burke's sublime, what
12848-451: The first to analyze links between aesthetics, information processing , and information theory . Max Bense, for example, built on Birkhoff's aesthetic measure and proposed a similar information theoretic measure M a ¨ = R / H {\displaystyle M_{\ddot {a}}=R/H} , where R {\displaystyle R} is the redundancy and H {\displaystyle H}
12994-429: The forms differ in their manner of imitation – through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama. Erich Auerbach has extended the discussion of history of aesthetics in his book titled Mimesis . Some writers distinguish aesthetics from the philosophy of art, claiming that the former is the study of beauty and taste while the latter is the study of works of art. Slater holds that
13140-530: The glass of the gallery's window. His face was covered in honey and gold leaf, and an iron slab was attached to his boot. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, into whose ear he uttered muffled noises as well as explanations of the drawings lining the walls. Such materials and actions had specific symbolic value for Beuys. For example, honey is the product of bees, and for Beuys (following Rudolf Steiner), bees represented an ideal society of warmth and brotherhood. Gold had its importance within alchemical enquiry, and iron,
13286-409: The ground. Luckily I was not strapped in – I always preferred free movement to safety belts ... My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact – there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I
13432-644: The group 'Donnerstag-Gesellschaft' ( Thursday Group ). The group organised discussions, exhibitions, events and concerts between 1947 and 1950 in Alfter Castle. In 1951, Mataré accepted Beuys into his master class where he shared a studio with Erwin Heerich , that he kept until 1954, a year after graduation. Nobel laureate Günter Grass recollects Beuys's influence in Mataré's class as shaping "a Christian anthroposophic atmosphere". He read Joyce , impressed by
13578-508: The hares, giving a voice to those who are misunderstood or do not possess their own....In the midst of this metaphysical communication and transmission, the audience was left out in the cold. Beuys deliberately distanced the viewers by physically positioning them in a separate gallery room — only able to hear, but not see what is occurring — and by performing the action for a grueling nine hours." Beuys performed Infiltration Homogen for Piano [ de ] in Düsseldorf in 1966. The result
13724-438: The human one. It's a way of going beyond our restricted understanding to expand the scale of producers of energy among co-operators in other species, all of whom have different abilities[.]" Beuys also acknowledged the physical demands of the performance. "It takes a lot of discipline to avoid panicking in such a condition, floating empty and devoid of emotion and without specific feelings of claustrophobia or pain, for nine hours in
13870-402: The idea that human conduct and behaviour ought to be governed by that which is beautiful and attractive. John Dewey has pointed out that the unity of aesthetics and ethics is in fact reflected in our understanding of behaviour being "fair"—the word having a double meaning of attractive and morally acceptable. More recently, James Page has suggested that aesthetic ethics might be taken to form
14016-546: The ingredients in a composition", but also the sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." Thus, sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure . For Immanuel Kant ( Critique of Judgment , 1790), "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging reflective contemplation. Judgements of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once. Kant observed of
14162-532: The instrument is dressed, swaddled even, in felt, legs and all, and creates a clumsy, pachyderm-like metaphor for a kind of silent entombment. But it is also a power incubated, protected and storing potential expressions ... pieces like Infiltration showcase the intuitive power Beuys had, understanding that some materials had invested in them human language and human gesture through use and proximity, through morphological sympathy." Art historian Uwe Schneede [ de ] considers this performance pivotal for
14308-462: The late 1960s, this renegade policy caused great institutional friction, coming to a head in October 1972 when Beuys was dismissed from his post. That year, he found 142 applicants who had not been accepted whom he wished to enroll under his teaching. Beuys and 16 students subsequently occupied the offices of the academy to force a hearing regarding their admission. They were admitted by the school, but
14454-491: The leading theorists from this school, Stanley Fish , was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970). As summarized by Berys Gaut and Livingston in their essay "The Creation of Art": "Structuralist and post-structuralists theorists and critics were sharply critical of many aspects of New Criticism, beginning with the emphasis on aesthetic appreciation and
14600-489: The main spaces of the Edinburgh College of Art . The exhibition was a defining moment for British and European art, directly influencing several generations of artists and curators. Aesthetics Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics ) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste and, in a broad sense, incorporates the philosophy of art . Aesthetics examines
14746-433: The metal of Mars, stood for a masculine principle of strength and connection to the earth. A photograph from the performance, in which Beuys sits with the hare, has been described "by some critics as a new Mona Lisa of the 20th century," though Beuys disagreed with the description. Beuys explained his performance this way: "In putting honey on my head I am clearly doing something that has to do with thinking. Human ability
14892-456: The mimetic arts possesses what Stephen Halliwell calls "highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes." For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly,
15038-509: The need for students to take draftsmanship classes, he encouraged his students to freely set their own artistic goals without having to conform to set curricula. Another aspect of Beuys's pedagogy was open "ring discussions" or Ringgesprache , where Beuys and his students discussed political and philosophical issues of the day, including the role of art, democracy, and the university in society. Some of his ideas espoused in class discussion and in his art-making included free art education for all,
15184-416: The objective side of beauty by defining it in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. Hedonist conceptions , on the other hand, focus more on the subjective side by drawing a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful
15330-448: The observer. One way to achieve this is to hold that an object is beautiful if it has the power to bring about certain aesthetic experiences in the perceiving subject. This is often combined with the view that the subject needs to have the ability to correctly perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as "sense of taste". Various conceptions of how to define and understand beauty have been suggested. Classical conceptions emphasize
15476-403: The one hand, beauty is ascribed to things as an objective, public feature. On the other hand, it seems to depend on the subjective, emotional response of the observer. It is said, for example, that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". It may be possible to reconcile these intuitions by affirming that it depends both on the objective features of the beautiful thing and the subjective response of
15622-461: The order was determined using fractal compression. There is also the case of the Acquine engine, developed at Penn State University , that rates natural photographs uploaded by users. There have also been relatively successful attempts with regard to chess and music. Computational approaches have also been attempted in film making as demonstrated by a software model developed by Chitra Dorai and
15768-426: The perception of artwork; artworks presented in a classical museum context are liked more and rated more interesting than when presented in a sterile laboratory context. While specific results depend heavily on the style of the presented artwork, overall, the effect of context proved to be more important for the perception of artwork than the effect of genuineness (whether the artwork was being presented as original or as
15914-485: The philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgments of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature ". Aesthetics studies natural and artificial sources of experiences and how people form a judgment about those sources of experience. It considers what happens in our minds when we engage with objects or environments such as viewing visual art, listening to music, reading poetry, experiencing
16060-477: The philosophy of art as aesthetics covering the visual arts, the literary arts, the musical arts and other artists forms of expression can be dated back at least to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. Aristotle writing of the literary arts in his Poetics stated that epic poetry , tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry , painting, sculpture, music, and dance are all fundamentally acts of mimesis , each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner. Aristotle applies
16206-417: The physical and spiritual worlds." Australian sculptor Ken Unsworth wrote that Infiltration "became a black hole: instead of sound escaping, sound was drawn into it ... It wasn't as if the piano was dead. I realised Beuys identified felt with saving and preserving life." Artist Dan McLaughlin wrote of the "quiet absorptive silencing of an instrument capable of an infinity of expressions The power and potency of
16352-498: The plight of children affected by the drug. ( Thalidomide was a sleep aid introduced in the 1950s in Germany. It was promoted to help relieve the symptoms of morning sickness and was prescribed in unlimited doses to pregnant women. However, it quickly became apparent that Thalidomide caused death and deformities in some children of mothers who had taken the drug. It was on the market for less than four years. In Germany around 2,500 children were affected.) During his performance, Beuys held
16498-461: The poem" ) in 1735; Baumgarten chose "aesthetics" because he wished to emphasize the experience of art as a means of knowing. Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics in the fragment Aesthetica (1750) is occasionally considered the first definition of modern aesthetics. The term was introduced into the English language by Thomas Carlyle in his Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825). The history of
16644-466: The problems of energy and culture." Beuys's art was considered both instructive and therapeutic – "His intention was to use these two forms of discourse and styles of knowledge as pedagogues." He used shamanistic and psychoanalytic techniques to "manipulate symbols" and affect his audience. In his personal life, Beuys had adopted a felt hat, a felt suit, a cane and a vest as his standard look. The imagined story of him being rescued by Tartar herdsmen perhaps
16790-533: The reception of German avant-garde art in the United States since it paved the way for recognition of not only Beuys' own work but also that of contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz , Kiefer , Lüpertz , and many others in the 1980s. In May 1974, Beuys flew to New York and was taken by ambulance to the site of the performance, a room in the René Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway. Beuys lay on
16936-425: The relationship between Beuys and the school was irreconcilable. He again occupied the university offices with a group of students; the police were called and he was escorted laughing from the building. This was depicted in a photograph which was used to create a 1973 silkscreen print with the title Democracy Is Funny . Shortly after, he was dismissed from his post. The dismissal, which Beuys refused to accept, produced
17082-417: The results amplified by a PA system as viewers observed from the doorway. In her book on Beuys, Caroline Tisdall wrote that The Chief "is the first performance in which the rich vocabulary of the next fifteen years is already suggested," and that its theme is "the exploration of levels of communication beyond human semantics, by appealing to atavistic and instinctual powers." Beuys stated that his presence in
17228-472: The rise of the New Criticism school and debate concerning the intentional fallacy . At issue was the question of whether the aesthetic intentions of the artist in creating the work of art, whatever its specific form, should be associated with the criticism and evaluation of the final product of the work of art, or, if the work of art should be evaluated on its own merits independent of the intentions of
17374-535: The role of the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic experience. Hal Foster attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture . Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty, κάλλος kallos ). André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to
17520-445: The room "was like that of a carrier wave, attempting to switch off my own species' range of semantics." He also said: "For me The Chief was above all an important sound piece. The most recurring sound was deep in the throat and hoarse like the cry of the stag....This is a primary sound, reaching far back. ... The sounds I make are taken consciously from animals. I see it as a way of coming into contact with other forms of existence beyond
17666-439: The same position ... such an action ... changes me radically. In a way it's a death, a real action and not an interpretation." Writer Jan Verwoert noted that Beuys' "voice filled the room, while the source was nowhere to be found. The artist was the focus of attention, yet remained invisible, rolled up in a felt blanket throughout the duration of the event...visitors were...forced to stay in the neighboring room. They could see what
17812-530: The same sculptures as beautiful. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value. In a current context, a Lamborghini might be judged to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol, or it may be judged to be repulsive partly because it signifies over-consumption and offends political or moral values. The context of its presentation also affects
17958-439: The scope of art and aesthetics. In 1941, Eli Siegel , American philosopher and poet, founded Aesthetic Realism , the philosophy that reality itself is aesthetic, and that "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." Various attempts have been made to define Post-Modern Aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original,
18104-500: The series of articles on "The Pleasures of the Imagination", which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712. The term aesthetics was appropriated and coined with new meaning by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (English: "Philosophical considerations of some matters pertaining
18250-631: The six exercise books of drawings would constitute, Beuys declared, an extension of Joyce's seminal novel. In 1959, Beuys married Eva Wurmbach. They had two children, Wenzel (born 1961) and Jessyka (born 1964). In 1961, Beuys was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His students were artists Anatol Herzfeld , Katharina Sieverding , Jörg Immendorff , Blinky Palermo , Peter Angermann , Walter Dahn , Johannes Stüttgen [ de ; fr ] , Sigmar Polke and Friederike Weske. His youngest student
18396-400: The so-called autonomy of art, but they reiterated the attack on biographical criticisms' assumption that the artist's activities and experience were a privileged critical topic." These authors contend that: "Anti-intentionalists, such as formalists, hold that the intentions involved in the making of art are irrelevant or peripheral to correctly interpreting art. So details of the act of creating
18542-478: The statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the poem " Ode on a Grecian Urn " by John Keats , or by the Hindu motto "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" (Satya (Truth) is Shiva (God), and Shiva is Sundaram (Beautiful)). The fact that judgments of beauty and judgments of truth both are influenced by processing fluency , which is the ease with which information can be processed, has been presented as an explanation for why beauty
18688-553: The study of the evolution of emotion . Wilhelm Lehmbruck Born in Meiderich (part of Duisburg from 1905), he was the fourth of eight children born to the miner Wilhelm Lehmbruck and his wife Margaretha. He was able to study sculpture arts at the School of Applied Arts in Düsseldorf by a stipend from the municipal authorities. In 1899 he began to make a living by doing illustrations for scientific publications. He trained at
18834-427: The term mimesis both as a property of a work of art and also as the product of the artist's intention and contends that the audience's realisation of the mimesis is vital to understanding the work itself. Aristotle states that mimesis is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals and that all human artistry "follows the pattern of nature". Because of this, Aristotle believed that each of
18980-430: The text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting. In another essay, " The Affective Fallacy ," which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy", Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the reader-response school of literary theory. One of
19126-468: The theory of art and academic teaching, and social and political activities. In 1962, Beuys befriended his Düsseldorf colleague Nam June Paik , a member of the Fluxus movement. This began what was to be a brief formal involvement with Fluxus, a loose international group of artists who championed radical erosion of artistic boundaries, bringing aspects of creative practice outside of the institution and into
19272-405: The total energy and creativity for every individual. Beuys described how we must seek out and energize our spirituality and link it to our thinking powers so that "our vision of the world must be extended to encompass all the invisible energies with which we have lost contact." Beuys saw his performance art as shamanistic and psychoanalytic to both educate and heal the general public. "It was thus
19418-475: The village at the time. Beuys was brought to a military hospital where he stayed for three weeks, from 17 March to 7 April. It is consistent with Beuys' work that his biography would have been subject to his own reinterpretation; this particular story has served as a powerful origin myth for Beuys's artistic identity, and has provided an initial interpretive key to his use of unconventional materials, amongst which felt and fat were central. Despite prior injuries, he
19564-700: The war, he returned to Berlin where he committed suicide on 25 March 1919. Lehmbruck's sculptures mostly concentrate on the human body and are influenced by Naturalism and Expressionism . His works, including female nudes, are marked by a sense of melancholy and an elongation of form common to Gothic architecture . Throughout his career, architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe placed his friend Lehmbruck's sculptures and those of Aristide Maillol into his buildings and designs. The Lehmbruck Museum (Duisburg, Germany) has in its collection about 100 sculptures, 40 paintings, 900 drawings and 200 graphical works by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. The museum, named after Wilhelm Lehmbruck,
19710-523: The world – from Düsseldorf (Germany) via New York (USA) to Tokyo (Japan), and received at Vienna's Palais-Liechtenstein Museum of Modern Art. This fax event was a sign of peace during the Cold War in the 1980s. Beuys's first solo exhibition in a private gallery opened on 26 November 1965 with one of his most famous performances: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare . The artist could be viewed through
19856-499: Was Elias Maria Reti who began to study art in his class at the age of 15. Beuys entered wider public consciousness in 1964, when he participated in a festival at the Technical College Aachen which coincided with the 20th anniversary of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. Beuys created a performance or action ( Aktion ) which was interrupted by a group of students, one of whom attacked Beuys, punching him in
20002-749: Was a comparatively recent invention, a view proven wrong in the late 1970s, when Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and information theory. Denis Dutton in "The Art Instinct" also proposed that an aesthetic sense was a vital evolutionary factor. Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between taste and the sublime . Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism , "... will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain." Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via
20148-459: Was a member of a Dadaist art movement Fluxus and singularly inspirational in developing of Performance Art, called Kunst Aktionen, alongside Wiener Aktionismus that Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann termed Art Happenings . Today, internationally, the largest performance art group is BBeyond in Belfast, led by Alastair MacLennan who knew Beuys and like many adapts Beuys's ethos. Beuys
20294-417: Was a piano covered entirely in felt with two crosses made of red material affixed to its sides. Beuys wrote: "The sound of the piano is trapped inside the felt skin. In the normal sense a piano is an instrument used to produce sound. When not in use it is silent, but still has a sound potential. Here no sound is possible and the piano is condemned to silence." He also said, "The relationship to the human position
20440-442: Was completely buried in the snow. That's how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying 'Voda' (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat, and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in." Records state that Beuys remained conscious, was recovered by a German search commando, and that there were no Tatars in
20586-568: Was deployed to the Western Front in August 1944, assigned to a poorly-equipped and trained paratrooper unit . He received a gold Wound Badge for having been wounded in action over five times. On the day after the German unconditional surrender (8 May 1945), Beuys was taken prisoner in Cuxhaven and brought to a British internment camp from which he was released three months later, on 5 August. He returned to his parents who had moved to
20732-534: Was first performed in Copenhagen in 1963 and in Berlin in 1964. Beuys positioned himself on the gallery floor wrapped entirely in a large felt blanket, and remained there for nine hours. Emerging from either end of the blanket were two dead hares. Around him was an installation of copper rod, felt, fat, hair, and fingernails. Inside the blanket Beuys held a microphone into which he breathed, coughed, groaned, grumbled, whispered and whistled at irregular intervals, with
20878-409: Was happening but remained barred from direct physical access to the event. The partial closing-off of the performance space from the audience space created distance, and at the same time increased the attraction of the artist's presence. He was present acoustically and physically as part of a piece of sculpture, but also absent, invisible, untouchable[.]" Verwoert suggests that The Chief "can be read as
21024-622: Was originally designed by his son, Manfred Lehmbruck (1913–1992). The Honolulu Museum of Art , the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Städel Museum (Frankfurt, Germany), the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin, Germany) and the Tate Gallery (London, England) are among the public collections holding works by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. One of his sculptures can be seen in
21170-565: Was professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1961 until 1972. He was a founding member and life-long supporter of the German Green Party . Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany , on 12 May 1921, to Josef Jakob Beuys (1888–1958), a merchant, and Johanna Maria Margarete Beuys née Hülsermann (1889–1974). Soon after his birth, the family moved from Krefeld to Kleve , an industrial town in Germany's Lower Rhine region, close to
21316-517: Was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units. From 1943 onward, he was deployed as rear-gunner in a Ju 87 "Stuka" dive-bomber, initially stationed in Königgrätz , later moving to the eastern Adriatic region . Drawings and sketches from this time have been preserved, and his characteristic style is evident in this early work. On 16 March 1944, Beuys's plane crashed on
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