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TThhiinnkkiinngg iiss ffoorrmm :: tthhee ddrraawwiinnggss ooff JJoosseepphh BBeeuuyyss AAnnnn TTeemmkkiinn aanndd BBeerrnniiccee RRoossee,, wwiitthh aa ccoonnttrriibbuuttiioonn bbyy DDiieetteerr KKooeepppplliinn Author Temkin, Ann Date 1993 Publisher Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art ISBN 0876330898 Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/387 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art , (cid:149) i v. » r - *, »f 1 f-'ll-h4 (cid:149)' Li&Ai Thinking Is Form The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (cid:149)(cid:149)(cid:149)(cid:149)(cid:149) (cid:149) (cid:149) (cid:149) (cid:149)(cid:149) -.- (cid:149) $50.00 Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose with a contribution by Dieter Koepplin The public reaction that greeted Joseph Beuys's death in 1986 resembled that more usually accorded to a deceased world statesman than an artist. Yet even now the art and life of this contro versial and extremely influential German artist remain impenetrably intertwined —e ven more so perhaps because Beuys, like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, precisely orchestrated his public image, building a personal myth that has the power to bind together his entire oeuvre. Thinking Is Form breaks through the mass of obscure writing about Joseph Beuys to intro duce this legendary artist in a simple and clear manner, through his utterly individual drawings. The subject of a major touring exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Philadel phia Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago, Beuys's drawings are used here as the springboard for discussions of his life, art, and ideas. Some employ such unconventional mediums as hare's blood or margarine, or use the backs of envelopes or commercial stationery. Some incor porate photographs, pressed flowers, and other organic materials, emphasizing their function as a reservoir of ideas for Beuys's sculpture, actions (performance art), and other enterprises. His achievement is viewed in the broader context of European art, and his graphic works are considered chronologically as his formative medium, in relation to his work as a whole, and as autobiographical narrative. This is the first time that the disciplines of curator and connoisseur have been rigorously applied to the selection and presentation of a truly representative segment of Beuys's work. Beuys, following the strategy articulated by Duchamp, made his own life his masterwork, and his drawings formed the drafts for that work. Now that the work is complete, it is through the drawings that we can begin to grasp as a whole the accomplishment of a man who declared "Everyone is an artist." With Z91 illustrations, 135 in color On the jacket: Detail of For Felt Corners, 1963 (plate 103) Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys ::: iili! Thinking Is Form The Drawings of Joseph Beuys Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose with a contribution by Dieter Koepplin JH Thames and Hudson in association with Philadelphia Museum of Art The Museum of Modern Art, New York Foreword Since his death in 1986 at the age of sixty-four, Joseph Beuys has steadily continued to gain greater recognition across Europe as one of the extraordinarily seminal art ists of our century. It is with a sense of privilege and challenge that our institutions have collaborated on the first major exhibition of Beuys's work to be organized in the United States since the 1979 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in which the artist himself was energetically involved and which, therefore, constituted in many ways a vast work of art in its own right. As with the life and art of other twentieth-century figures such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage —whose interests and influence embraced intersecting fields including metaphysics, the arts, the environment, or even politics —t he dilemma posed by the loss of the artist, as the living center of a complex body of ideas, actions, and images, is to find ways in which to understand the works of art that remain as containing and expressing that life. The very title of this exhibition, Thinking Is Form, expresses Beuys's conception of the processes of drawing and making sculpture as profoundly akin to thought. In deciding to focus upon drawings across Beuys's entire career, choosing among more than ten thousand works from the earliest exquisite diagrams of animals to the last blackboards crowded with delineations of actions, Bernice Rose, Senior Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, and Ann Temkin, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, have conjoined their individual talents and approaches to the artist's work to produce a survey that strives to be at once comprehensive and fresh. That they were able to attempt this is due to the remarkable ability of the owners of Beuys's work, whether private or public, to take passionate and informed interest in such a project. The lenders were, in every sense, supporters, and we are deeply grateful to all of them. Without the steady and thoughtful help and encouragement of Eva Beuys, this exhi bition would not have been possible. The collaboration of such old friends, col leagues, and collectors of Beuys's work as Hans and Franz Joseph van der Grinten was invaluable; that their remarkable collection will be accessible in the future Schloss Moyland Museum in Germany is deeply gratifying. We are also thankful for the participation of one of the most respected Beuys scholars, Dieter Koepplin, whose essay on a single drawing published here indicates the richness to be explored in the artist's imagery. Given the international nature of this venture, it is a source of special gratification that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany should have taken such an interest in the exhibition as to award it a major grant through its cultural division. Without the energy, resourcefulness, and unfailing good humor of Irene Kohlhaas, Cultural Counselor at the Consulate General of the Federal Repub lic of Germany, in New York, we would have lost heart several times along the way. To Deutsche Bank, and in particular to Christian Strenger, formerly Managing Director, Deutsche Bank Capital Corporation in New York, we owe a vast debt of gratitude for recognizing the importance of this exhibition for the United States public and offering both substantial financial and moral support at an early stage. To Dr. Herbert Zapp, Managing Director of Deutsche Bank, Mr. Horst Risse, Managing Director of Deutsche Bank Capital Corporation, and Mr. Michael Rassmann, General Manager of Deutsche Bank, we extend our heartfelt thanks. We are also especially grateful to the management and staff of Lufthansa German Airlines, which has generously assisted with the transportation costs of the exhibition. There has been no lack of support for this international project in the United States, from a grant received from the National Endowment for the Arts and an indemnity approved by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities to significant con tributions from private foundations and individuals: The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., The Bohen Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Ronald S. Lauder and The Solow Foundation in New York, and Lewis Mani- low in Chicago. We are also most grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Lauder and Mr. and Mrs. Josef Froehlich, Stuttgart, for their support of this publication, which accompanies the exhibition. We could not have been happier to be joined in presenting this exhibition to the public across the United States by The Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, with which we have collaborated on many occasions. James N. Wood, Director, and Douglas Druick, Curator of Drawings in Chicago, and Richard Koshalek, Director, and Paul Schimmel, Chief Curator in Los Angeles, have been patient and enthusiastic colleagues. To our own respective staffs, of course, go warm thanks for their significant share in realizing this endeavor —a nd to George Marcus, Head of Publications in Philadel phia, and Jane Watkins, Senior Editor, our gratitude for this substantial volume, embodied in Nathan Garland's sympathetic design, which presents for the first time in English an overview of Beuys's achievement through his drawings. Almost twenty years after Joseph Beuys's first performance in the United States, the salutary shock still reverberates, although a relatively small number of viewers were actually witness to his three days spent in a bare room of the Rene Block Gallery in New York, communing with that distinctly North American symbol of our original wilderness, the coyote. It is the hope of the authors, and of our two institutions, that this exhibition and catalogue will find a new and expanded audience for the art of Joseph Beuys as he moves from the romantic scholar/poet of his youth to the mature environmental and political activist (and back again full circle), drawing and think ing, thinking and drawing, in the same breath. Anne d'Harnoncourt Richard E. Oldenburg The George D. Widener Director Director Philadelphia Museum of Art The Museum of Modern Art, New York