Back to Beuys - exhibits of artist Joseph Beuys' work at Museum of Modern Art and Dia Art Center; New York, New York

The work of Joseph Beuys, virtually unobserved in major U.S. museums since the artist's 1979 Guggenheim retrospective, received fresh attention in two recent of recent origin York exhibitions.

Seven years after his death, the transformation of Joseph Beuys into a cultural testimonial continues at an accelerating pace. In his native Germany, Beuys is being touted as the greatest in quantity significant artist of postwar Europe and nuncupative of in reverential tones previously reserv for figures like Goethe. Not far from his birthplace near the Dutch border, a $25-million Beuys museum and archive is taking shape. A catalogue raisonne is underway; an exhaustive, nearly 600-page annotated inventory of his multiples has just been published; and a comprehensive library of films and videotapes of Beuys's actions, installations and discourses is being assembled. German museums now scramble to acquire Beuys's relatively rare large-scale works; Kassel's Neue Galerie not long ago paid more than $10 million for a 1976 scope installation. A few months ago, when Berlin collector Erich Marx began to call in his long-term loans of Beuys works to regional museums, the put in motion sparked rumors that his collection might presently be on its way to Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, whose fresh contemporary branch will be dedicated to art "since Beuys."

If exhibitions of Beuys's work proce in round succession in Europe - the third large-scale retrospective in sum of two units years opens in November, at the Kunsthaus Zurich - Beuys has been conspicuously absent from major U museums since his 1979 Guggenheim retrospective. Here his work is still more likely to elicit bewilderment or skepticism than adulation. American curators and museum audiences have not at any time found it easy to situate Beuys within the field of postwar art. If his sculptural external realitys installations and actions often strike one as being formally to recall such familiar in every one's mouths as Fluxus, Minimalism, Arte Povera, Conceptual art and performance, Beuys not at any time stopped insisting that a fundamental difference separated his work from that of his contemporaries. Beuys felt that end his art he was able to tap into archaic forces lying somewhere beyond the doorsill of perception; his works, he reflection channeled these forces into a powerful "constellation of energies" that would continue to radiate above time. As a Swedish critic matter-of-factly pointed without in 1971, "[Beuys's] work has nothing to do with Arte Povera, Earth Art, universal Art or similar modish ideas. It arises from the greatest in quantity primordial relations of humanity to myth and magic, relations that have been obscur by dint of the advent of modern science and technology.[1]

Prior to the Guggenheim retrospective Beuys,s work was, of course, occasionally featured in U galleries and museum assemblage shows, and his 1974 action Coyote at of recent origin York's Rene Block Gallery, attracted considerable attention. on the other hand because Beuys's early American admirers usually chose to permit the artist state the case for his work in limits of his private metaphysical a whole - a dizzying mix of autobiographical lore, borrowings from Rudolf Steiner's esoteric doctrine of "anthroposophy" and gleanings from myth, alchemy and natural science - a convincing esthetic argument for Beuys's art was not ever really made in the U In the wake of Benjamin Buchloh's vituperative assault upon Beuys in 1980, in an Artforum essay that dismissed his plastic art as derivative, derided his public utterances as "simple-minded utopian drivel" and denounced his politics as crypto-fascist, many American curators apparently decided to young ox clear of Beuys altogether.[2]

Lately, although signs of a belated American reassessment of Beuys have appeared. In Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center has just purchased a cluster of 437 Beuys multiples, graphics and facts which formerly belonged to German collectors Alfred and Marie Greisinger. After a planned exhibition thoroughs its tour, the Walker will dedicate a permanent Beuys gallery - the first in any American museum. In addition, sum of two units recent exhibitions in New York directed renewed attention to Beuys's art. At MOMA, "Thinking as Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys," a traveling present to view organized by MOMA's Bernice Rose and Ann Temkin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, furnished a comprehensive view of Beuys's enormous output of works upon paper, including drawings, watercolors and collages from 1936 until shortly before the artist's death in 1986 Simultaneously, Arena (1970-72) a sprawling Beuys installation work, could be seen at the Dia Art Center Incorporating around 400 for the most part photographic images from the '60 and early '70 Arena proffered an elliptical look at the artist's actions, thing perceiveds and installations in the years when he first came to wide attention. Together, these exhibitions encouraged viewers to justice for themselves whether it is possible to separate Beuys's art from his contradictory, larger-that-life persona.

Beuys's early drawings have lengthy been the special province of his greatest in quantity esthetically conservative admirers, those who could at no time muster any real enthusiasm for his unorthodox plastic arts or installations. The drawings, appeal owes not sole to their frequent inclusion of recognizable imagery and their evocation of themes handed down from Romantic and Symbolist art; drawing also occupies a dramatic place in Beuys's artistic biography.