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Born in 1921, Joseph Beuys was the “perfect” age to fight for Hitler and he did, with the wounds to prove it. The Andy Warhol portraits that complement this exhibition, without actually being part of it, brutally catch his gaunt, ravaged face in the glare of a photo flash under the hat he wore to hide burns sustained in a plane crash while serving in the Luftwaffe. The most haunting portrait turns Beuys into a spectral negative image, all darkness and shadow, his eyes wounded, guilty, lost. This was in the 1970s when Beuys was a charismatic one-man artistic revolution, inspiring young Germans to plant trees, lecturing about flows of ecological and human energy – and, in breathtaking performances, speaking to a dead hare or spending a week locked in a cage with a coyote.
All that remains today of those actions, protests and performances are posters, preserved scrawls on blackboards and mesmerising videos. Yet the moment Beuys disappeared – he died in 1986 – his solid, material sculptures took over. He believed passionately in flow and flux, promoting an animist vision of humanity and the cosmos. When he stopped talking and acting, entropy gripped his art, making it a static, slumped set of dead objects. And all the greater for it.
Who would want to take a bath in this? The sculpture at the heart of this exhibition, Bathtub, is a massive steampunk metal tank with protruding pipes and valves, the inside rumpled and mottled like human flesh, the entire grotesque structure resting on a giant mammoth tooth. Cast from a design Beuys tinkered with from 1961 to near the end of his life, Bathtub is a sinister, unforgettable work, immersing you not in hot water but in the black bile of modern history, its pipes connected to the fetid sewer of the 20th century’s worst horrors.
Beuys enchants and sickens you simultaneously. This excellent show celebrates him at his most Wagnerian: an unabashed mythmaker, reviving ancient Germanic lore. For who would use such an epic bathtub? Brunhilde of course. The exhibition is called Bathtub for a Heroine, in case we miss that.
Meanwhile, his 1949 sculpture Lead Woman imitates the wild anatomies of the Venus of Willendorf and other Palaeolithic sculptures from Germany, Austria and central Europe. You can see why an artist searching for German renewal after 1945 might turn the clock back 30,000 years. In the stone age, from which the “Venus” figures that inspired Beuys come, he can imagine a prelapsarian national mythology. His little nude sculpture with its massive hips embodies a Wagnerian cult of mythic women that’s been freed from Wagner’s sins. In dreamy watercolours like Female Figure (1954) and Animal Woman (1949), Beuys redeems the Rhinemaidens.
The obsession with prehistory reaches a screaming climax in his 1961 work Mammoth Tooth, Framed, consisting of a real tooth from an extinct mammoth, ivory and grey, ridged and furrowed, supporting a small copper bathtub. It’s a maquette for the giant bath at the heart of the show. Perhaps this ancient tooth from a beast that roamed Germany before Germany existed can purify the bath and whoever bathes in it.
Yet, walking around Bathtub, I see no escape from history. Far from a balm of forgetting, it looks like a coffin for a Valkyrie, jagged and ugly with memory. The horrible pipes jutting from it seem to plumb into the machinery of mass murder just as surely as the rusty rails in his great installation Tramstop lead to Auschwitz.
Beuys always had one foot in the grave. As time goes by, his utopian hopes are eclipsed by the immeasurable truths that weigh down his art. This blast of him is a reminder of the joyous yet cursed creativity of an artist who literally saved his country’s culture, giving it access to myths that might have been forever internally censored, laying the tramlines for today’s great German artists Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer and showing the way to any young artist who wants to discover the poetry of material objects. It is also, be warned, a bath in history’s acid.
