Joseph Beuys
Felt, fat, a Luftwaffe crash he may have invented, and the claim that everyone is an artist.
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld in 1921, served as a Luftwaffe radio operator, and built his public persona around a wartime crash in Crimea after which, he said, Tatars wrapped him in fat and felt to keep him alive. Historians have found little to support the story and it hardly matters: felt and fat became the materials of a body of work that treated sculpture as something closer to social process. He taught at Dusseldorf until he was dismissed in 1972 for admitting every applicant, co-founded the German Green Party, and planted the first of 7,000 Oaks at Kassel in 1982. He died in 1986.
Beuys made multiples on a scale almost no other artist of his stature attempted — over five hundred editions, catalogued by Schellmann, from postcards and felt suits to sledges and vitrined objects, often in editions of a hundred or more. These are the bulk of the market and are entirely legitimate works, but they must be identified precisely by Schellmann number, and the printed or stamped documentation is part of the piece. Organic materials in the unique work degrade, and condition reports on fat, felt and food-based elements need to be read closely.
If you own a work by Joseph Beuys
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.