約瑟夫‧博伊斯

Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf

Fänn und Willy Schniewind, Neviges (acquired from the above in 1956)

Thence by descent to the present owner in 1980

Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Duitse Kunst van Heden, September - November 1964, no. 21

Dusseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Surrealität-Bildrealität, December 1974 - February 1975, no. 8

Colour: The colours are less saturated in the original and the reds tend more towards a pale pink in the original. Please refer to the online catalogue for a more accurate illustration of the work. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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“Drawing is the first visible form in my works… the first visible thing of the form of the thought, the changing point from the invisible powers to the visible thing… It’s really a special kind of thought, brought down onto a surface...”

Joseph Beuys cited in: Exh. Cat., Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art (and travelling), Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys, New York 1993, p. 73.

 

First acquired in 1956 by the leading Beuys collectors of the time, Fänn and Willy Schniewind, Die Intelligenz des Wasservogels (The Intelligence of the Water Bird) is a rare example from Joseph Beuys' repertoire of early drawings. For its exquisite use of watercolour, delicate chromatic palette, and all-over graphic automatism, Die Intelligenz des Wasservogels is an exceptional and captivating example from this formative corpus.

Created during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, the early drawings paved the way for Beuys' unique and complex approach to art-making. The decades following the end of World War II ushered in a period of introspection and artistic soul-searching; by prodigiously drawing, Beuys sought to overcome the spiritual and physical wounds left behind in war’s aftermath. Indeed, signposting both a subjective and collective state of flux, the drawings catalogue a response to the trauma of war. Inspired by the earthbound and the spiritual, by mythology and philosophy, these works on paper represent the very foundation of Beuys’ personal brand of artistic anthroposophy for the post-war age. As curator Bernice Rose has outlined, “drawing became for Beuys the means for making psychological space coextensive with pictorial space, enabling a personal rewrite of history” (Bernice Rose, ‘Joseph Beuys and the Language of Drawing’, in: Exh. Cat., Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art (and travelling), Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys, 1993, p. 75). Through combining a transformative belief in nature and science, and by recuperating folkloric German emblems (previously marred by National Socialism’s fervent adoption of nationalistic symbols), Beuys forged a shamanistic belief in the healing powers of art. The early drawings thus constitute a formative litany of Beuys’ complex artistic ideology.

Where the drawings after 1964 were often created in preparation for the artist’s performances – or Actions – the earlier drawings exist as entirely autonomous works in themselves. Crucially, Die Intelligenz des Wasservogels narrates the moment Beuys increasingly turned towards drawing as his principal mode of artistic communication. Only two years later in 1958, he created his seminal and ground-breaking Projekt Westmensch, a vast book comprising four volumes of over 1,000 pages that illustrate the artist’s theories and aesthetic ideas in graphic form. Similar to the present work, many of these compositions are fluidly abstract with only the works’ titles hinting at a narrative or theme. In keeping with these books, Die Intelligenz des Wasservogels extends the graphic vocabulary of Beuys’ earlier nature studies and their reclamation of the talismanic symbols of German folklore. Beuys’ core belief in the reunification of the human spirit with nature is bolstered by the present work’s title and its affirmation of the natural world’s innate wisdom. Teeming with an elemental energy as channelled through paroxysmal graphic lines and free flowing exuberant watercolour, this drawing pairs abstract forces and energy flows with an embrace of the ecological – a radical artistic stance that set the stage for Beuys’ place among the most profound artists of the Twentieth Century.