Joseph Beuys made art that is hard to photograph and easy to remember. A grey felt suit hung on a hanger. A wooden sled with a rolled felt blanket, a lump of fat and a torch strapped to its back. A brown cross painted on a folded newspaper. Each works like a visual identity: a few materials, repeated until they stand for the artist.
A note on images: Beuys’s work remains in copyright, and none of his works at the Art Institute of Chicago or the Met is flagged public domain, so this guide describes it in text only. For historic images that museums have cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Joseph Beuys?
Beuys was born on 12 May 1921 in Krefeld, in the Rhineland, and grew up near Kleve, according to Britannica and the Joseph Beuys archive at Museum Schloss Moyland. He served in the German air force in the Second World War. In 1944 the aircraft he was flying in crashed on the Crimean front; the pilot died and Beuys was injured.
After the war he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1947, studying under the sculptors Joseph Enseling and Ewald Mataré, and completed Mataré’s master class in 1951. In 1961 he was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the same academy. He died in Düsseldorf on 23 January 1986.
The crash story: his account, not the record
Beuys often told a much more dramatic version of the 1944 crash. In his telling, nomadic Tatars found him in the snow, wrapped his body in fat and felt to keep him warm, and nursed him back to health. The story gave his materials an origin myth and was repeated in obituaries.
Scholars dispute it. In a 1980 essay in Artforum, the critic Benjamin Buchloh questioned the account, and later researchers, cited by the writer Olivia Laing in The Guardian, point to records indicating that Beuys was recovered by a German search team. The safest reading is that the rescue is Beuys’s own story about his work, not a documented event. For designers, that is the lesson: he understood that materials gain meaning when a narrative is attached to them.
What to look at: a limited material palette
Look at a group of Beuys works side by side and the repetition is striking. The Art Institute of Chicago lists the materials of Sled (1969) as a wooden sled, felt, belts, a flashlight, fat and rope. Its Felt Suit (1970) is felt on a wooden hanger with wire. Two works on paper in the same collection, Bear (1963) and Braunkreuz (1964), use brown paint on white paper and on folded newspaper.
Felt and fat. Felt is soft, grey, insulating and absorbent; fat is pale, waxy and changes with temperature. Beuys returned to both throughout his career, and he talked about them as stores of warmth and energy. The visual effect is consistent: muted colours, soft edges, handled surfaces.
Braunkreuz. The name means “brown cross.” Beuys used it for a dense, rust-brown paint that appears in drawings, on objects and as a mark on sculptures. On paper it reads like dried earth, an unglamorous colour that ties many works together.
Grey, brown, cream. Put those materials together and you get a palette of grey felt, brown paint, cream paper and pale fat. It is narrow, warm and quiet, the opposite of the saturated colour of 1960s Pop art.
Actions: performance as a designed image
Beuys called his performances “actions,” and many of them were staged with the precision of a set design. He took part in Fluxus events in the early 1960s, including the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus at the Düsseldorf academy in 1963.
On 26 November 1965, at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, he performed How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. With his head covered in honey and gold leaf, he carried a dead hare around the exhibition and spoke to it about the pictures, while visitors watched through the window and doorway. Photographs of the action circulated widely, and the image of the gold-covered head became one of the visual signatures of his career.
In May 1974, for I Like America and America Likes Me, he flew to New York, was taken by ambulance to the René Block Gallery, and spent several days in a room with a coyote, a length of felt and a walking stick. He left the same way, so the piece is framed by arrival and departure, without seeing the city.
Both actions share the objects’ discipline: few props, a defined space, a clear start and end, one striking image.
Multiples, stamps and the edition as a medium
Beuys made hundreds of multiples: objects, prints and printed ephemera produced in editions. The Pinakothek der Moderne’s catalogue of his multiples lists Felt Suit as an edition of 100, published by Galerie René Block in Berlin. The Walker Art Center records Sled as an edition of fifty, related to his installation The Pack (1969), in which a column of sleds spills from the open back of a Volkswagen van.
Many multiples carry a rubber stamp with Beuys’s name or a short German word. The Met holds a Stempelplastik (stamp sculpture) from 1982, made of PVC, wood and rubber, and a 1977 piece, Food for Thought, made of offset lithograph, a butter stain and a black ink stamp on paper. The stamp works like a maker’s mark, turning a cheap object into an authenticated part of the system.
The Art Institute’s woodcut Shallows (1973–74), from the portfolio Multiplizierte Kunst, brings the same restraint to printmaking; our printmaking theme collects public-domain prints by earlier artists.
Social sculpture and 7000 Oaks
Beuys used the term “social sculpture” for the idea that art could shape society, and that everyone could take part in it. An exhibition listed by Tate in 1978 used the German phrase Jeder Mensch ein Künstler, “every person an artist.” He also put the idea into his teaching. In 1972 he was dismissed from his professorship after admitting students the academy had rejected; accounts give the number as more than 50 or as 142. He helped set up the Free International University, dated to 1973 or 1974 depending on the source, and was involved in founding the German Green Party around 1980.
His long-running public project began at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. 7000 Oaks started as a heap of basalt columns in front of the Fridericianum museum; each stone was to be set upright beside a newly planted tree, and the heap shrank as the trees went in. According to the Dia Art Foundation, which helped fund it, the last tree in Kassel was planted at the opening of documenta 8 in 1987, after his death. Dia extended the work to West 22nd Street in New York in 1988, pairing trees with basalt stones.
How designers can borrow from Joseph Beuys
Choose a material vocabulary. Pick three or four materials or textures and use them everywhere. Beuys’s felt, fat and brown paint work like a brand’s typeface, colour and paper stock.
Build a muted palette from materials. Start from grey felt, rust brown, cream and a pale wax tone, and test it in the colour palette generator. Treat these as a mood, not measured values.
Use a stamp as a signature. A simple rubber stamp, wordmark or seal applied by hand can unify packaging, prints and ephemera, and makes each piece feel authenticated.
Treat editions as a medium. Limited-run prints, zines and objects can spread a studio’s ideas, as multiples spread his.
Stage one strong image. For an event, limit the props, define the space and plan the photograph people will share.
Attach a story, honestly. Beuys showed how much meaning a narrative adds to a material. Use origin stories, but keep them accurate; his crash story is still debated decades later.
For contrast, see our guides to Sigmar Polke, who also worked in Düsseldorf and treated materials as subject matter, and Martin Kippenberger, a younger German artist who made editions and self-mythology part of his practice.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Joseph Beuys?
A German sculptor, performance artist and teacher (1921–1986), based in Düsseldorf, known for felt and fat, for actions and for the idea of social sculpture.
Why did Joseph Beuys use felt and fat?
He described them as materials that store warmth and energy. He linked them to a story of being rescued by Tatars after a 1944 plane crash, but scholars dispute that account, and records indicate he was recovered by a German search team.
What is 7000 Oaks?
A project begun at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, pairing 7,000 newly planted trees with basalt stones. The last Kassel tree went in at documenta 8 in 1987, and the Dia Art Foundation extended the work to New York in 1988.
Is Joseph Beuys’s work public domain?
No. Beuys died in 1986 and his work remains in copyright. None of his works at the Met or the Art Institute of Chicago is flagged public domain, so this guide describes them in text only.
