Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Joseph Beuys and History

Joseph Beuys and History

Spaulding, Daniel

Hardcover

Art Criticism & TheoryGeneral ArtIndividual Artists

Publisher Price: $37.00

ISBN10: 0691279543
ISBN13: 9780691279541
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Mar 24 2026
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.20
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

A groundbreaking study of one of the most important and influential artists of the postwar period

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century--and 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 everyone is an artist 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's work and career.

By putting Beuys in the context of Germany's postwar recovery, Spaulding shows that the artist's 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's disquieting echoes of the Nazi past suggest that not everything could be reconciled in what Beuys called social sculpture.

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's metaphorology, and ecological thought. Precisely because Beuys went to the extremes of art, the book demonstrates, he belongs at the center of its history.

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