ART

The definitive introduction to one of the most important and influential artists in postwar visual arts, reissued to mark the 30th anniversary of Beuys’s death. Alain Borer is a French poet and writer. He has been a Professor at l’École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Tours since 1979, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, since 2005.

160 illustrations 31.0 x 24.0cm 240pp ISBN 978 0 500 092675 January £40.00

The Essential Joseph Beuys Alain Borer

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Subject to passionate controversy during his lifetime, the work of Joseph Beuys is now considered one of the most significant and influential contributions to 20th-century art. This book provides a survey of Beuys’s oeuvre, which he viewed as part of a larger, philosophically based practice emphasizing direct democracy, free access to education and the restructuring of society to meet ecological requirements. Arranged in chronological order are 152 works from Beuys’s many fields of activity – drawings and watercolours, prints and multiples, sculpture and objects, spaces and actions – that demonstrate the artist’s formal versatility, creative richness and conceptual depth. The peculiar poetry of the materials Beuys used – felt, grease, honey, wax, copper and sulphur – also emerges along with the gentle melancholy suffusing the work of this agent provocateur. Alain Borer analyses Beuys’s motivation with special reference to the artist’s written and spoken statements.

Also available:

ISBN 978 0 500 093856 £50.00