Few artists have cast a longer or more generative shadow over the postwar art world than Joseph Beuys. The German provocateur, teacher, performer, and self-mythologizer—with his felt hats and slabs of fat—recast what it meant to be an artist, and more radically, what art itself could be. Today, nearly four decades after his death, Beuys’s legacy hasn’t just endured—it has matured, multiplied, and infiltrated the DNA of contemporary practice across the globe.
Beuys’s early biography reads like a fable wrapped in trauma and ambition. Born in 1921, he came of age just as the world unraveled. With the onset of World War II, he trained as a Luftwaffe radio operator under Heinz Sielmann, the noted zoologist and filmmaker. He also briefly pursued lectures in biology and zoology at the University of Posen—clues, perhaps, to the material sensitivities and quasi-scientific aura that would later permeate his practice.
By 1942, Beuys was deployed to the Crimean front as part of a bomber unit. Eventually, he served as a rear gunner in the notorious Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber, a role as grim as it sounds. What followed is now part of postwar art lore: on March 16, 1944, his plane crashed. The version Beuys told, often and with great poetic conviction, was that he had been rescued by nomadic Tatar tribesmen who wrapped his injured body in felt and fat—materials that would later become his artistic signature.
It’s a powerful narrative, one that shaped his work’s iconography and cast him as a kind of postwar shaman-artist reborn through suffering. But the facts remain hazy. Military records suggest no Tatars were present and that he was found by German troops, semiconscious and severely wounded. Still, like much of Beuys’s legacy, the truth lives somewhere between documentation and mythology.
After convalescing, he returned to active duty, this time as a paratrooper. When the war ended, he moved back in with his parents in a suburb of Kleve, physically battered but inwardly transformed. It’s no surprise that his early drawings from this period—some of which survive—already pulse with the proto-symbolic language that would later define his work: a raw, searching visual grammar steeped in healing, memory, and mythmaking.
Beuys believed in the idea of social sculpture, the notion that every aspect of life could be approached as a creative act capable of shaping society. This once-radical proposition now undergirds a surprising amount of current art, particularly socially engaged practices that blur the boundaries between aesthetics and activism. Artists like Tania Bruguera, Theaster Gates, and Thomas Hirschhorn, to name only a few, work in direct dialogue with this expanded field of artmaking that Beuys pioneered. Whether through community organizing, performance, or utopian gestures, these artists inherit his commitment to art as a tool for transformation.
Beuys’s influence also runs deep in the material intelligence of today’s conceptualism. His use of unconventional, charged materials—felt, fat, copper—was never just formal; it was symbolic, political, and autobiographical. Contemporary artists like Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, and even younger practitioners like Otobong Nkanga and Danh Vo have continued this tradition, embedding their work with materials that speak, ache, and remember.
It’s easy to forget how radical Beuys once seemed, especially to American audiences. When his work was introduced to the U.S. art scene in the ’70s, critics were baffled, if not outright hostile. His theatrical performances—part shamanic ritual, part political allegory—resisted formalism, demanded context, and exuded a European gravitas that stood apart from American Minimalism and Pop. But like all truly influential artists, Beuys waited out the noise. Today, his once-maligned actions, such as I Like America and America Likes Me—in which he spent several days in a gallery with a coyote—read less like stunts and more like complex dialogues with myth, identity, and power.
More importantly, the breadth of his influence has become clearer over time. Relational aesthetics—the movement articulated in the 1990s by Nicolas Bourriaud—owes Beuys a debt, even if it rarely acknowledges it. So does the current vogue for eco-conscious, anti-capitalist, and participatory practices. Beuys’s insistence that “everyone is an artist” is now embedded in the curriculum of virtually every art school in the West, for better or worse. His pedagogical legacy—especially through his long tenure at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—has created a lineage of artists who view art as a vector for philosophy, politics, and healing.
But like any inheritance, Beuys’s legacy is not without its complications. His self-fashioned mythology—wounded WWII pilot, shamanic healer, charismatic prophet—has rightly been scrutinized for its ambiguities and half-truths. And yet, in a time when the art world often prizes market sheen over metaphysical depth, Beuys stands as a reminder of the moral and existential stakes art can carry.
There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that Beuys, who once argued for the dematerialization of art, has become such a market force and museum staple. His vitrines, drawings, and relics are now prized objects. Yet the heart of his project was never the object. It was always the idea—the belief in art as something not only to be seen but to be lived.
Perhaps this is why Beuys feels so relevant now, especially to a generation of artists grappling with climate collapse, authoritarianism, and the fraying social fabric. His work doesn’t offer solutions, but it models a way of thinking, a way of being, that insists on the generative power of art—its capacity to provoke, to imagine, to care.
Joseph Beuys didn’t just influence art. He changed its operating system. And like all true system upgrades, the effects are still unfolding.
