91桃色

Joseph Beuys (1921鈥�1986) was one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century鈥攁nd one of the most controversial. Working in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, he explored a radically expanded concept of art through a practice that ranged from performative actions to large-scale sculptural ensembles. While some contemporaries found his claim that 鈥渆veryone is an artist鈥� liberating, even revolutionary, others accused him of fostering a dangerous cult of personality. In Joseph Beuys and History, the first rigorous art historical study of the artist in English, Daniel Spaulding presents a striking new interpretation of Beuys鈥檚 work and career.

By putting Beuys in the context of Germany鈥檚 postwar recovery, Spaulding shows that the artist鈥檚 superimposed biological, political, and economic metaphors offered a powerful way to think about the trajectory of human freedom, the place of art in capitalist modernity, and the possibility of an ecological aesthetics. At the same time, his oeuvre鈥檚 disquieting echoes of the Nazi past suggest that not everything could be reconciled in what Beuys called 鈥渟ocial sculpture.鈥�

A definitive account of an often-misunderstood figure, Joseph Beuys and History proposes an ambitious rewriting of the dominant narrative of modern and contemporary art, drawing from Marxian value-form theory, Hans Blumenberg鈥檚 鈥渕etaphorology,鈥� and ecological thought. Precisely because Beuys went to the extremes of art, the book demonstrates, he belongs at the center of its history.