- Joseph Beuys: The ReaderOur PickBy Claudia Mesch, Viola Michely, Arthur C. Danto
- The Essential Joseph BeuysBy Alain Borer
- What Is Art?: Conversation with Joseph BeuysBy Joseph Beuys, Volker Harlan
- Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western ManOur PickBy Joseph Beuys, Kim Levin, Caroline Tisdall
- Joseph Beuys & Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, Inspiration, IntuitionBy Allison Holland
Important Art by Joseph Beuys
Woman/Animal Skull (1956-1957)
This work on paper dates from Beuys's early experimental phase, which was characterized by the artist's production of thousands of drawings under a self-imposed program of aesthetic asceticism. Beuys worked at this time mostly in solitude, as though under a strenuous search for self-enlightenment, simultaneously seeking a new artistic language that would combine the spiritual and the physical, the solid and the fluid, the ephemeral and the permanent. Woman/Animal Skull suggests a melding of the rational and the instinctual, or of the human and the animal minds out of a primordial state of organic chaos.
Fat Chair (1964-1985)
Fat Chair exemplifies how Beuys could turn two common materials of everyday life - here the organic components of fat and wood - into a composite, open-ended metaphor for the human body, its impermanent condition, and the tendencies for social life to conform to constructed convention. Created in 1964 and encased in a glass, temperature-controlled museum display case, Fat Chair subsequently underwent a slow, natural process of decay until 1985, by which time the fat had almost entirely decomposed and virtually evaporated. Through these basic organic compounds, viewers may well have imagined themselves occupying this chair, thus endowing Fat Chair with the status of a "proxy" for self-reflection on the transience of human life and the need to consciously and expeditiously channel one's own organic and-alas-ephemeral energies.
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)
In this performance piece, Beuys could be viewed - his head and face covered in honey and gold leaf - through a gallery's windows, a slab of iron tied to one boot, a felt pad to the other, as the artist cradled a dead hare. As though carrying out a strange music (if not some macabre bedtime story), Beuys frequently whispered things to the animal carcass about his own drawings hanging on the walls around him. Beuys would periodically vary the bleak rhythm of this scenario by walking around the cramped space, one footstep muffled by the felt, the other amplified by the iron. Every item in the room - a wilting fir tree, the honey, the felt, and the fifty-dollars-worth of gold leaf - was chosen specifically for both its symbolic potential as well as its literal significance: honey for life, gold for wealth, hare as death, metal as conductor of invisible energies, felt as protection, and so forth. As for most of his subsequent installations and performance work, Beuys had created a new visual syntax not only for himself, but for all conceptual art that might follow him.
Influences and Connections

- John Cage
- George Brecht
- James Joyce
- Rudolf Steiner
- Martin Heidegger
- George Maciunas
- Nam June Paik
- Hanns Lamers
- Erwin Heerich
- Fluxus
- Happenings
- Social Philosophy
- Georg Baselitz
- Anselm Kiefer
- Lothar Wolleh
- Markus Lupertz