Further Reading
Bernhard, Ruth.The Eternal Body. Text by Margaretta
Mitchell. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1986.
Corinne, Tee. ‘‘Ruth Bernhard.’’ In Claude Sommers, ed.
The Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Online Encyclo-
pedia. Forthcoming.
Kaplan, Ilee, Marina Freeman, and Constance Glenn.Ruth
Bernhard: Known and Unknown, Long Beach, CA: Cali-
fornia State University Art Museum, 1996.
Mitchell, Margaretta.Ruth Bernhard: Between Art and Life.
Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 2000.JOSEPH BEUYS
German
Joseph Beuys was not a photographer; however, as a
conceptual artist, he exploited the promotional capa-
city of photographs, using them to document his
performances and disseminate his ideas, greatly
influencing the development of photography in the
1970s as he influenced virtually every other area of
contemporary art practice. Beuys infused his art with
his persona, establishing his own image as the central
icon in his oeuvre. To achieve this, Beuys consis-
tently wore the same uniform: felt hat, fisherman’s
vest, white work shirt, blue jeans, and black boots.
As a result, Beuys’s photographic image registered
instant recognition informing the production of star-
tling, compelling images of himself as a political and
spiritual leader during the Cold War era. Although
Beuys created art in traditional forms, most notably
drawings and sculptures, he is best known for his
socially-oriented didactic performances and political
activities. Photographs recording these events are
central to understanding his diverse oeuvre.
Beuys avoided traditional art media and adopted
such materials as fat, felt, honey, and other organic
substances in a personal symbolism for his theoretic-
ally complex work. A tireless promoter of his pe-
dagogical concept, ‘‘Social Sculpture,’’ Beuys drew
extensively from his life experiences to underscore
his central belief that humans are creative beings and
that only by harnessing this power could a true
democracy be fully realized. Beuys did not remain
isolated in the realm of art; he established several
political organizations in West Germany, including
the German Student Party and the Organization
for Direct Democracy through Referendum, and he
was a co-founder of the Green Party. These ventures
enabled him authentically to fuse art with politics
and gain access to a wider audience. Harnessing the
propagandistic force of photographs, Beuys infil-
trated the political arena to publicize his aesthetic
ideology. He famously proclaimed:
Every human being is an artist who—from his state of
freedom—the position of freedom that he experiences at
firsthand—learns to determine the other positions in the
total artwork of the future social order. Self-determina-
tion and participation in the cultural sphere (freedom); in
the structuring of laws (democracy); and in the sphere of
economics (socialism).’’
(Cuoni 1990, 21)
As a young adult, Beuys considered medicine for
a profession but was drafted by the German military
in 1940. He became a dive-bomber in the Luftwaffe
and, in 1943, his plane was shot down in the Crimea.
He claimed to have been found, unconscious, by
Tartars who smothered his body with animal fat
and covered him with felt (animal pelts) to keep
him warm. For 12 days, he drifted in and out of
consciousness before being found by a search party,
ultimately regaining full consciousness in a German
hospital. It is unclear if his recounting of this event is
fact or the creation of a personal myth; Beuys’s
hospital records indicate the crash occurred in
1944 and that Russian civilians delivered him to
the Germans. In an effort to support his account
of this wreck, Beuys provided photographs of (re-
portedly) his damaged Stutka. Regardless of Be-
uys’s accuracy in recall, this trauma was a key
episode that transformed the development of his
iconography and aesthetics.
After the war, Beuys studied at the Kunstakade-
mie Du ̈sseldorf with Ewald Matare ́, working as
Matare ́’s master student until 1954. Throughout the
1950s, Beuys produced countless works on paper and
later claimed that his aesthetic ideology and personal
iconography were initially established during this
phase. After undergoing a severe depression that
lasted several years, Beuys was appointed ProfessorBEUYS, JOSEPH