How Beuys combined his political, scientific, spiritual and artistic concerns into a compelling vision of "social sculpture" This book examines the crucial period between Joseph Beuys' (1921-86) return to his hometown of Kleve after World War II at the age of 24 and his appointment as a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1961. During this "incubation" phase, key themes relevant to his future work emerged, which structure this book: biography as material for artistic formation; poetry/romanticism; natural sciences: physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and geography; philosophy/anthropology and Steiner; economics, capitalism, labor, politics. The aim of this book, along with the 2021 exhibition of the same name at Museum Kurhaus Kleve for which it is the catalog, is neither to venerate a local saint of Kleve nor to topple an artist from an earlier generation. Instead it highlights the influences and ideas that saw Beuys develop from a "sensitive traditionalist" into a "visionary social sculptor.
‘Did Rudolf Steiner dream these things? Did he dream them as they once occurred, at the beginning of all time? They are, for sure, far more astonishing than the demiurges and serpents and bulls found in other cosmogonies.’ – Jorge Luis Borges Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, recorded his view of the world in many books, but also in over 5,000 lectures. Through the latter medium particularly, he explained his ideas on a wide range of subjects, including education, science, the social question, art, architecture, medicine and agriculture. Steiner spoke freely, using only minimal notes. But when explaining conceptually difficult subject matter, he frequently resorted to illustrating what he was saying with coloured chalks on a large blackboard. After the lecture the drawings were rubbed out and thus irretrievably lost – but not in every case. From the autumn of 1919, thick black paper was used to cover the blackboards, so that the drawings could be rolled up and stored. The trustees of Rudolf Steiner’s estate in Dornach, Switzerland, possess over 1,000 of these drawings, which visually document Steiner’s view of the world and his creative way of thinking. A selection of the drawings was first shown to a wider public in 1992. Since then, numerous exhibitions in Europe, America and Japan have generated great interest in Rudolf Steiner’s work. WALTER KUGLER, born in 1948, began working in the Archive of the Trustees of Rudolf Steiner’s Estate in 1982 as one of the editors of the Complete Works.
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