Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld and died in 1986 in Düsseldorf. He is the immediate cultural-pedagogical predecessor to the Neo-Expressionist generation. His teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy — the erweiterter Kunstbegriff (expanded concept of art), the shamanic performance, the pedagogical authority as medium — shaped the milieu from which both Capitalist Realism and Neo-Expressionism emerged.
Kiefer was Beuys’s student directly. Immendorff was expelled by Beuys’s academy and then readopted the Beuys inheritance through performance and political action. Baselitz and Lüpertz were not Beuys students, but they breathed the same Düsseldorf air: the antipathy toward academic finish, the belief that art must engage history, the use of unconventional materials.
Beuys’s influence on Neo-Expressionism is structural rather than stylistic. He did not paint; he performed, lectured, and organized. But his insistence that art must be a form of social sculpture — that the artist’s role is to reshape the world, not merely to depict it — underwrites the Neo-Expressionists’ claim that their return to figuration was not nostalgia but necessity. The same Düsseldorf milieu produced Richter and Polke (cool, ironic, photographic) and Kiefer and Immendorff (hot, mythic, material). Beuys is the common ancestor.
Beuys’s materials — felt, fat, copper, beeswax — reappear in Kiefer’s vocabulary (lead, straw, ash, sand) as a direct inheritance. The shamanic authority that Beuys claimed for himself is transferred, in Kiefer’s work, to the painting: the canvas as ritual site, the material as witness to history. The Beuys question — whether the shamanic persona is genuine or theatrical — is the Kiefer question too.
See also
- Anselm Kiefer — the student who carried the historical burden furthest
- Jörg Immendorff — the student expelled and then returned
- capitalist-realism — the parallel Düsseldorf movement that also emerged from Beuys’s milieu
- lidl-akademie — Immendorff’s counter-academy as anti-Beuys Beuys