Joseph Beuys: The Reader

Claudia Mesch, Viola Michely & Authur C. Danto

Softcover | 15.57 x 1.78 x 23.34 cm | 352 pp

MIT Press | 2007 | 9780262633512

Twentieth-century artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) - legendary and self-mythologising, enigmatic and controversial - remains an important influence on artists today. Beuys embraced radically democratic artistic and political ideas, proclaiming "Everyone is an artist," and advocating direct democracy through referenda. He famously worked with such nontraditional materials as felt, fat, and plants and animals both alive and dead. Beuys and his work - performance, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation - received perhaps the most contentious reception of any postwar artist. 

This reader brings together the crucial writings on Beuys and his work, presenting key essays by prominent artists and critics from North America and Europe. With a foreword by Arthur C. Danto, Style and Salvation in the Art of Beuys, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's now classic 1980 essay, Beuys, Twilight of the Idol, and influential texts by Vera Frenkel, Thierry de Duve, Rosalind Krauss, Peter Burger, Irit Rogoff, and others, this is the most significant gathering of critical texts on this challenging artist that has ever been assembled.