Of Song and Silence: Pamela Kort

On January 12, 1986, Joseph Beuys was awarded the Wilhelm Lehmbruck prize and gave a moving speech that paid tribute to the artist for whom it had been named. Eleven days later Beuys died, leaving behind his unedited talk, which had been delivered without a manuscript and was subsequently transcribed from tape.¹ Departed was an orator who “thanked” an artist from whom he had been parted his whole life: Lehmbruck had cut short his existence two years before Beuys was born. Truncated, in part, called upon to take over a part, a series of leavings that impart: such are the measures that Lehmbruck's work hummed to Beuys.

Let us take as a point of departure the very first sentence of Beuys’s speech: “I would like to thank my teacher Wilhelm Lehmbruck.”² As is well known, Beuys was a master student of Ewald Mataré at the Dusseldorf Art Academy between 1947 and 1952, where, as it happens, Lehmbruck had studied forty-six years earlier. Beuys’s choice of the word “teacher” directs attention to the concept of an educator, an idea of central importance to the formulation of his own artistic mission. Not surprisingly, in 1890, a year before Lehmbruck was born, the effort to found modern art in Germany began to be perceived as dependent upon the identification of an instructor who could revitalize German cultural ideals. It was then that an inexpensive and soon-to-be widely read book, Rembrandt als Erzieher. Von einem Deutschen was published anonymously.³ Though Rembrandt was not a German, the author of this text, Julius Langbehn turned him into one, arguing that he embodied the spirit of Niederdeutschland, (the northern part of Germany); in so doing, Langbehn effectively erased the border between Holland and Germany. Langbehn's book was so successful that by 1909 it was in its forty-ninth edition.⁴ In that same year Julius Meier-Graefe published the first book of a three-volume monograph on the German painter Hans von Marées. In it Meier-Graefe argued that Marées had not only assimilated Rembrandts achievement, he had taken it to a new level, thereby making himself Rembrandt’s successor.⁵

All of this is not without consequence for Lehmbruck and Beuys. Both artists were born and raised in the Niederrheinland: Lehmbruck in Meiderich (near Duisburg) and Beuys in Krefeld and Kleve. Whereas Lehmbruck’s sentiments about Heimat (native district) are not known, Beuys, whose father was of Dutch ancestry, considered himself first and foremost a Niederrheinlander. Indeed, for his tastes, Krefeld lay too far from the heart of this borderland; he therefore changed the place of his birth to Kleve in the Lebenslauf Werklauf (Life course work course) that he drafted in 1964.⁶ Furthermore, Lehmbrucks favorite artist was Marées.⁷ Lehmbruck admired the tectonic, plastic quality of Marées's forms, which he sought to translate into sculpture, a fact that did not escape Meier-Graefe's attention. Indeed, in the second edition of his Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst Meier-Graefe lamented the fact that Marées had not experienced the challenge of having Lehmbruck as a student.⁸

Waiting Mantles

Beuys began the 1986 award speech with an allusion to his two initial encounters with Lehmbruck’s work: his rescue circa 1938, of a “photograph” (Photographie) from a National Socialist book-burning at his school and his discovery (1940-1941) of a “little book” (Büchlein) that he came across while at the Reichsuniversitat in Posen (during a break from military drilling during World War II). Though in his talk Beuys compressed the two events into a singular experience, elsewhere he distinguished between them.⁹ In all probability the “little book” was August Hoffs Wilhelm Lehmbruck, issued in 1933 as part of the popular Junge Kunst series.¹⁰ Of note is the first sentence of Hoff’s text, “As the Rembrandt-German wrote his strange book, in which he expected the artist to lead humanity back to unity and freedom, to soulfulness and introspection, the glowing flame of a lonely Van Gogh was extinguished.”¹¹ The 'Rembrandt-German' is an epithet for Langbehn, whose text appeared in 1890, the year of van Goghs death. In pointing out this coincidence Hoff sought to underscore the struggle to pinpoint an enduring figure who could fire a younger generation of German artists to an achievement not yet won, a goal that Lehmbruck did not live long enough to fulfill.

Although, Beuys had long admired van Gogh, definitive evidence of his attention to that artist’s achievement did not surface until 1970. It was then that Beuys pinned a piece of paper to a wall - in the room at the Edinburgh College of Arts where he presented the action Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Schottische Symphonie — that read “Where are the souls of…?” Written under this question were artists’ names, the first of which was van Gogh’s.¹²

Van Gogh’s relationship to the struggle for modern art in Germany had already been established some sixty years earlier, when in 1911 the Bremen Kunsthalle acquired his painting Mohnfeld. The purchase caused a group of conservative artists to publish Protest Deutscher Künstler, which in turn gave rise to the pamphlet Im Kampf um die Kunst, rapidly organized by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. A decade later, still in a defensive mood, Meier-Graefe published a two-volume book on van Gogh, which began with the statement, “This is the Germanic contribution to the development of modern European painting, the only indispensable one during the nineteenth century, and nearly the sole one since Rembrandt’s.”¹³ The opening line of Hoff’s booklet not only referenced this history, it emphasized Lehmbruck’s relationship to it.

As it was, two years before Meier-Graefe’s book on van Gogh appeared, Paul Westheim brought out the first Lehmbruck monograph, commemorating that artist’s death. It was no coincidence that Westheim compared Lehmbruck’s destructive, withdrawn, uncertain, and shy disposition to that of van Gogh, whose fate it was to “set himself alight, kindled by his own ardor and in those flames to consume himself.”¹⁴ Though Lehmbruck’s temperament may have been cool in comparison with van Gogh’s, one sculpture within his oeuvre would soon become associated with a flame. It was that work,Kniende, that Beuys would have seen as a frontispiece, when as he said in his talk, he “opened” (schlug die Seite auf) Hoff’s little book. Within this context, Beuys’s description of the effect the image made upon him while gazing at it begins to take on meaning: “And in the picture I saw a torch; I saw a flame and I heard: Protect the flame!” The meanings associated with a torch or a flame are integral to Beuys’s aesthetic interests and experiences. They range from the sacred flame of divine love held aloft by the ancient goddess Venus Coelestis and the flaming torch again held by a woman this time embodying Freedom in revolutionary France, to the activities of the Hitler Youth, conducted under the motto Flamme empor (flame aloft). It was the preservation and articulation of such systems of belief by a seemingly mute image that caught and held Beuys’s attention.

Remainders

Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Kniende [Fig. 1]

Lehmbruck’s Kniende is an extraordinary sculpture [fig. 1]. It looks like something we have always seen and know well, and yet it is unlike anything that we have ever laid our eyes upon. It marks a key point in Lehmbruck’s career: with it he temporarily turned aside from a style that seemed to fuse a Grecian plastic ideal with nineteenth-century naturalism and began to make idiosyncratic 'portraits' that nevertheless retained a certain classical quality.

Who is this kneeling figure? There is something unmistakably religious about her, a feature already noted in 1916 by Theodor Däubler, who described the figure’s disposition in these terms: “That is no longer a prayer, but a devout meditation, a belief, in the vertical, which has to come. One day she will arise and sweep us along. Or leave us behind.”¹⁵ Däubler’s attention to the Kniende’s devotional aspect suggests that she is a kind of 'virgin'. A few years later, in 1924, Meier-Graefe imagined her instead as the angel of the annunciation.¹⁶ The idea of the sculpture as a wingless angel was also advanced in an early National Socialist picture book on the subject of mankind’s beauty. In it the Kniende was reproduced on a full page and sanctioned by a caption that read in part: “This upright flame emanates from the form of the Kniende. 'I strive towards God, said the flame'. This figure no longer needs angel wings in order to fly away.¹⁷ Shortly thereafter, however, the National Socialists denounced the sculpture as 'degenerate' and purged it from public collections. Within five years, by 1942, the sculpture had become a symbol for free European art in America.¹⁸

To my eye, the Kniende appears to fuse the image of a kneeling angel with that of a humble virgin. Though her downward-inclined head – right arm turned in upon itself, and the left lying upon her thigh – correspond to the disposition of the virgin during the annunciation, designated as 'cogitatio', this she remains without specific iconographic precedent.¹⁹ Indeed, Lehmbruck’s virgin is far more inwardly focused than biblical tradition would have it. This virgin is not just pondering how to salute an unseen angel, she is thoroughly detached from herself and the world. The sculpture is visibly invisible, as though the subject has departed leaving us with this empty vertical commemorative encasement.

The drape stretched across and around this female’s legs calls attention to itself as a garment. Its purpose is not to conceal, but to reveal an otherwise veiled realm, that is neither an outside nor an inside. Indeed, this shroud resembles a kind of husk out of which this strange 'virgin/angel' arises. Lehmbruck’s Kniende is a sculpture against imitation. It is a remainder without antecedent that functions by analogy: it is at once like things we know and completely different from them.

The first few sentences of Beuys’s award speech suggest, then, his awareness of the aesthetic tradition surrounding the reception of the Kniende. Moreover, by the late 1950s he had come to see himself as a maker of images in terms that resemble those of his self-proclaimed “teacher.” It was then, possibly spurred on by his reading of Jean Gebser’s Ursprung und Gegenwart (first published in 1949) that Beuys started to make works that make visible the veiled as a sign of the “contemporaneity (presence) of the future.²⁰

Digressions

Let us return now to Beuys’s first encounter with Lehmbruck’s work, namely the “photograph” he retrieved from a pile of burning books at his school in 1938. In his 1986 talk Beuys’s characterized this photo as a mere “fragment” (Bruchstück). Beuys’s choice of words emphasizes both the incomplete quality of the photographic image, detached from its printed source, and the partial quality of the reproduced thing, itself no longer a whole. In actuality, Beuys did not simply recover a single photograph from the fire but several books, Dadaist magazines, and “art catalogues” in one of which the image must have served as a reproduction. Discussing this event as one of the 'key experiences' of his career — nearly forty years later – Beuys commented: “I looked through them [the books and catalogues] once again, having already read sections of them... and there was a reproduction of a torso by Lehmbruck.”²¹ Since Beuys mentions having already read these items in part, then this illustration of a Lehmbruck torso could only have belonged to one of two ample catalogue-type texts on the artist, published before 1938. By far the most popular was Westheim’s monograph of 1919, whose title page read Das Werk Lehmbrucks in 86 Abbildungen.²² Even if Beuys had an actual art catalogue in his hands, it is tempting to conclude that he was not merely fascinated with the image but with the condition it embodied, subsumed under a statement reiterated both in Hoff’s small book of 1933 (and in his larger book of 1936 Lehmbruck und seine Sendung), a statement with which Westheim’s short monograph had commenced: “Lehmbruck’s work has remained a torso.”²³ This declaration is ironic for Lehmbruck’s oeuvre was in fact truncated by his premature death. Though he is perhaps best known for his mastery of the fragmented torso type, he left behind an unfinished legacy. The perception of Lehmbruck’s achievement as 'fragmentary' has persisted to this very day.

Possibly the earliest surviving work of Beuys’s student years is a sculpture of 1949–1951 titled Torso, coincidentally, at this writing a long-term loan to the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg [fig. 2].²⁴ As it also happens, the year Beuys purportedly began making this sculpture, 1949, also saw the first large exhibition of Lehmbruck’s works shown in Diisseldorf.²⁵ Beuys could not have been unaware of the exhibition: by that time he had been studying sculpture for nearly three years at the Art Academy in that very city. Moreover, in 1949 there were also Lehmbruck exhibitions in three other German cities: Mannheim, Hamburg, and Stuttgart. Though Beuys probably did not begin 'modeling' the sculpture until 1949, there is evidence that he was already 'working' on it in 1945.²⁶ Beuys had been a prisoner of war until 5 August 1945, Thereafter, he returned to Kleve where he started preparing himself for admission to the academy by helping out in several artists’ studios.²⁷

Beuys’s Torso commemorates physical deterioration in terms of corporeal construction. It is indeed a kind of memorial, positioned well above eye level 'upon' the rather odd pedestal of a sculptor’s modeling block. While the date and the unfinished appearance of this sculpture directs attention to the site of Beuys’s student workshop, the blackish paint, poured over its front, lends it the appearance of a charred relic. What we have here is a leftover that asserts its being as such. Almost haughtily this abandoned work of art arches slightly forward as though it has taken flight from its own half-finished state. This sculpture, then, is no more than a mere plaster husk that documents a proud departure. Beuys intentionally left his Torso incomplete; it is a time-worn remnant of an unfulfilled mission, a homage to a way not taken.²⁸ It was this exact plight that Lehmbruck’s art embodied for Beuys, one that he described in the following terms in his 1986 speech: “The exceptional work of Wilhelm Lehmbruck touched a threshold situation within the concept of sculpture ...[with it] he provided a culmination that was apparently no longer capable of further development.”²⁹

Rehearsing

Beuys Torso does not, however, just commemorate an apogee in terms of a dead end. It seems that Beuys left this strange sculpture behind to remind us where he began, namely with the “fragment” that Lehmbruck bequeathed to posterity. The rods of this Torso’s legs, broken off at the ankle, underscore that it hovers above a ground line upon which its feet should rest. Dangling from the modeling bar, Torso is the literal embodiment of the promise of Lehmbruck’s work, held in suspense.³⁰ It was from this place that Beuys took off, a site of departure that for him was simultaneously a ruin and a mold. It is not irrelevant that Beuys claims to have decided to become a sculptor in 1943 while flying as a fighter pilot in World War II, in other words, after he had left behind his encounters with Lehmbruck’s work.³¹ Upon returning to Germany in 1945, he would not only have found a burnt, fragmented landscape, but also may have seen a by now well-known reproduction of the actual ruin that Lehmbruck’s Kniende had become when, the same year, it was struck by a bomb that reduced it to a dilapidated torso. In 1945 Beuys would have been twenty-four years old. Is it a coincidence that this Torso is raised up to a setting that leaves twenty-four grooves exposed for the viewer to see? For what it is worth, in the following year, 1946, when he entered the Dusseldorf Art Academy – exactly forty-five years after Lehmbruck had begun to study there – Beuys inserted this phrase in his Lebenslauf Werklauf: “Kleve Kiinstlerbund 'Profil Nachfolger'.” There was indeed an artists’ association (Kunstlerbund) with which Beuys began to affiliate himself in the 1940s, but it did not incorporate the words Profil Nachfolger (Profile successor) in its name. The organization that he joined was reactivated in 1947 under the name Niederrheinischer Kunstlerbund Kleve after a group founded in 1936, the Kunstlergilde Profil.³²

In the booklet by Hoff that Beuys came across in Posen in 1940 or 1941, Beuys might have taken note of these words: “Lehmbruck has remained without an immediate successor ... Perhaps he will only find the proper succession in a coming generation.³³ Beuys, who throughout his artistic career had a sharp sense for the sound and meanings of words, may have intended the designation 'Profil Nachfolger' (accentuated by his placing it in quotations) as an evocation of himself as a qualified heir. Here then, Profil would mean not the contour of a sculpture, but an outline of character, cast as the embodiment of an individual candidacy. In this first euphoric student year, and for that matter, each of the next four years during which this entry reappeared in his Lebenslauf Werklauf, Beuys may have envisioned himself as the promised 'successor', who had long been sought, but not yet found in twentieth-century Germany.³⁴ Concurrent with the conclusion of his training in 1951 as a 'master student' of Ewald Mataré at the Art Academy, the designation vanished from his Lebenslauf Werklauf. It reappeared only one time more, in 1955, as “Ende von Künstlerbund 'Profil Nachfolger'” (End of the artist’s association Profil Nachfolger). Beuys could not have meant the dissolution of the Niederrheinischer Künstlerbund Kleve because it remained in existence until 1987.³⁵ Instead the entry, seems to refer to the temporary loss of belief in his calling, during a year when he experienced what he later described as an “upheaval in artistic development.”³⁶

Singing Silently

The idea of having been called upon is also to be found in Beuys’s speech of 1986. Looking at the image of the Kniende in Hoff’s small book, Beuys said: “There immediately arose the idea, an intuition: Sculpture – there is something to be done with sculpture. Everything is sculpture, this image seemed to call out to me.”³⁷ In 1943, the same year he decided to become an artist, Beuys wrote a poem about words of adoration spoken to an ivory-like carving of a female, who upon hearing them urges him to give her further form.³⁸ The poem is a variation of the Pygmalion legend, celebrated as an allegory of the sculptor’s vocation. Beuys designated his speaking sculpture as a Jungfrau (virgin). Let us recall within this context that when he gazed at Lehmbruck’s Kniende, Beuys said in his talk of 1986 that he saw a flame. As it happens, the Pygmalion legend is also connected with fire. According to Ovid, when Venus understood Pygmalion’s desire that his statue come to life, she made the flames surrounding the altar at which he stood, “shoot a tongue of fire into the air.”³⁹ However, Beuys’s explicit designation of the sculpture as a virgin also suggests his interest in the early Christian concept of the Virgin Mary as a “virtual fire” set aflame by a light that is simultaneously a soul and a living form of man.⁴⁰

A 'virgin' that speaks to the sculptor Pygmalion may be said to have been born from “a ray of light” that is the sculptor’s finger. Such a concept is to be found in a fundamental text addressed to the student of sculpture, namely, Johann Gottfried Herder’s Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygamlions Bildendem Traume.⁴¹ Indeed, Beuys was thinking of Herder’s concept of 'plastic willing' – the human being as a statue (Bildsäule) – as he delivered his 1986 Lehmbruck speech, a fact he revealed in an interview he gave shortly thereafter.⁴²

As such, Beuys’s statement “Everything is sculpture,” then, not only paraphrases the last line (“Sculpture is the essence of things”) of the only statement by Lehmbruck that is reprinted in Hoff’s booklet of 1933, but also makes allusion to Herder’s belief that the beginnings of language, partly preserved by Greek myths, are the actual source of the plastic ideal.⁴³ For Herder sculpture is both a mouthpiece and a declaration in and of itself.⁴⁴ It is this idea that most likely lies behind one of the fundamental premises of Beuys’s art: sculpture is language, one 'hears' it before it is seen.⁴⁵

Lehmbruck’s Kniende is no mere statue: its elongated form suggests that it is a metamorphosed column, a meaning implicit to the German term Bildsäule. The figure’s exaggerated size resists being fixed by the eye. The Kniende is a measure of the unmeasurable, a colossus if you will, whose presence is announced long before she materializes. Not surprisingly, Lehmbruck not only remained fascinated with the Pygmalion legend throughout his life but also wrote poetry, most likely inspired by his admiration of Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet also held in high esteem by Beuys.⁴⁶ Hölderlin, who was indebted to Herder’s understanding of 'language', believed that originally all parlance was song.

It is in this context that Beuys’s closing comment in his speech of 1986 takes on a very specific meaning: “I would like to take the side on which Wilhelm Lehmbruck lived and died, and where he entrusted every single person with this inner message. 'Protect the flame....'”⁴⁷ The measure — 'Protect the flame' - is in fact a transposed verse from a melody that Beuys admired for its tonal simplicity. Based on a poem by Pietro Antonio Metastasio, the lyric is 'Lektion I' (Lesson One) in Nicola Vaccai’s Metodo Pratico, still valued today as an expeditious primer for aspiring singers.⁴⁸ With this in mind, Beuys words would seem to suggest his understanding of Lehmbruck’s art in Hölderlin’s terms: sculpted images both preserve and impart the formative vitality of initial human tones. They also make covert reference to the idea of an intoning sculpture advanced by Herder in his essay Plastik, where he wrote: “Because [a statue] is human and a completely living body, because it speaks to us indeed and grips us while it penetrates our being, it awakens the entire string music of human sympathy.⁴⁹ As such, the exhortation 'Protect the flame' is a forthright plea to a listening public to hear the message of Lehmbruck’s and Beuys’s art, a private homage to his daughter Jessyka, with whom he sang this song, and a perfect refrain with which to end a speech of thanks to those educators, like Lehmbruck, who chiseled open his way.

January 1997

Notes

1   Joseph Beuys, “Dank an Wilhelm Lehmbruck,” in Christoph Brockhaus, ed.,Joseph Beuys: Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Preis 1986 (Duisburg: Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museum, 1986), unpaginated. All subsequent references to this speech are based upon this transcription. All translations are the author’s.

2   Beuys, “Ich möchte meinem Lehrer Wilhelm Lehmbruck danken,” note 1.

3   [Julius Langbehn], Rembrandt als Erzieher: Von einem Deutschen (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1890).

4   Johannes Stückelberger, Rembrandt und die Moderne: Der Dialog mit Rembrandt in der deutschen Kunst um 1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996), 47-49.

5   Julius Meier-Graefe, Hans von Marees: Sein Leben und sein Werk, 3 vols (Munich: R. Piper & Co, 1909-1910). See also, Stiickelberger, note 4, 65-66.

6   For Beuys’s identification with the Niederrheinland, see Franz Joseph van der Grinten, “Joseph Beuys, der Niederrhein und Fritz Getlinger,” in Getlinger Photographiert Beuys 1950-1963, exh. cat. (Kalkar: Stadtisches Museum, 14 October -11 November 1990)907: For the significance of Joseph Beuys Lebenslauf Werklauf, see Pamela Kort, “Joseph Beuys’s ‘Arena’: The Way In,” in Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly eds., Joseph Beuys ‘Arena’ – where would I have got if I had been intelligent (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1994), 18-33. The original copy of Joseph Beuys Lebenslauf Werklauf is in the possession of Armin Hundertmark in Cologne. It is reproduced in many sources, including Joseph Beuys: Werke aus der Sammlung Karl Ströher, exh. cat. Basel: Kunstmuseum, 16 November 1969-4 January 1970, 4-5.

7   H. F. Seckler, “Bemerkungen zu Hans von Marées,” in Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 2 (1925) 177; this is cited in Dietrich Schubert, Die Kunst Lehmbrucks (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1990), 145.

8   Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 3 vols. (1914, 1915, 1924; reprint, 2 vols., Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1987), 2: 583.

9   See Joseph Beuys and Georg Jappe, “Interview mit Beuys über Schlüsselerlebnisse, 27.9.76” in Kunst Nachrichten 13, no. 1 (November 1976): 73, 76-77. There Beuys links the time, mentioned in his 1986 talk - “Ich befand mich schon inmitten eines naturwissenschaftlichen Studiums” (I was already in the middle of studying the natural sciences) - to an experience that he had at the Reichsuniversitat in Posen in 1940. Moreover, Beuys’s comment in his 1986 talk, that the booklet “auf irgendeinem Tisch lag” (lay on some table), distinguishes it from the publication he had retrieved from a fire two years before. See the statement: “1938 erste Begegnung mit Photos von Plastiken Lehmbrucks, Erlebnis!” (1938 first encounter with photos of Lehmbruck’s sculptures, event!) in “Biographische Notizen von Joseph Beuys für Franz Joseph und Hans van der Grinten, ca. September 1961” in Transit: Joseph Beuys Plastische Arbeiten 1947-1985, exh. cat. Krefeld: Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, 17 November 1991-16 February 1992, 39.

10   There were only four books published about Lehmbruck between 1919 and 1939: Paul Westheim, Wilhelm Lehmbruck (Potsdam: Gustav Keipeneheur, 1919; 2nd ed. 1922); Hans Bethge, Wilhelm Lehmbruck zum Gedächtnis (Berlin: A. R. Meyer, 1920); August Hoff, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Junge Kunst 62/63 (Berlin: Klinckhardt & Biermann, 1933); August Hoff, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, seine Sendung und sein Werk (Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag, 1936). While Bethge’s pamphlet was a mere twelve pages in length and contained no images of Lehmbruck’s works, Westheim’s publication and Hoff’s text of 1936 are of standard book length, thereby ruling out all three of these as the ‘Büchlein’ (small book) to which Beuys referred. Moreover, later in his talk Beuys mentions the publication as a ‘kleines Heftchen’ (small booklet) stating he noted in it the span of Lehmbruck’s life. The 1933 Hoff pamphlet concludes with a brief description of Lehmbruck’s life under the heading “Lebensdaten” (life chronology).

11   Hoff, 1933, note 10, 1. “Als der Rembrandtdeutsche sein selstames Buch schrieb, in dem er erwartete, dass der Künstler die Menschheit zurückführen werde zur ‘Einheit und Freiheit, zur Innigkeit und Innerlichkeit,’ hatte gerade van Gogh einsam seine glühende Flamme verlodert.”

12   For Beuys’s deep interest in van Gogh, see Joseph Beuys and Dieter Koepplin, “Nicht blosse Bilder: Gespräch über Edvard Munch vom 16 März 1985,” in Edvard Munch, exh. cat., Basel: Kunstmuseum, 9 June-22 September 1985, 139. On Celtic at the Edinburgh College of Arts in 1970, see Richard Demarco, “Notes to Beuys,” in Johannes Stüttgen ed., Similia Similibus: Joseph Beuys zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Johannes Stüttgen, (Cologne: DuMont, 1981), 119.

13   Julius Meier-Graefe, Vincent 2 vols., (Munich: R. Piper & Co, 1921), 2: 9, cited in Wulf Herzogenrath, “‘Ein Schaukelpferd von einem Berserker geritten’- Gustav Pauli, Carl Vinnen und der ‘Protest deutscher Kiinstler’,” in Manet bis van Gogh, exh. cat. Berlin: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 20 September 1996-6 January 1997, 270: “Dies ist der germanische Beitrag zur Entwicklung der modernen europäischen Malerei, der einzig unentbehrliche im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, nahezu der einzige seit Rembrandt.”

14   Westheim, 1922, note 10, 12. “Van Gogh ist das Beispiel des innerlich glühenden, leidenschaftlohenden, ekstatischen Menschenn dessen Schicksal es ist, sich an der eigenen Glut zu entflammen und flammend sich zu verzehren.”

15   Theodor Daubler, “Expressionismus,” in Der neue Standpunkt (1916; reprint, Munich: Kösel, 1973), 187. “Das iskein Beten mehr, sondern eine Andacht, ein Glaube an die Lotrechte, die kommen muss. Sie wird aber einmal aufstehn. ..uns mitzureissen. Oder uns zurücklassen.”

16   Meier-Graefe, 1987, note 8,2:584.

17   Hans W. Fischer, Menschenschönheit. Gestalt und Antlitz des Menschen in Leben und Kunst (Berlin: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, 1935), 105; this is cited in Silke Wenk, Versteinerte Weiblichkeit. Allegorien in der Skulptur der Moderne (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), 249-50: “Diese lautere Flamme strahlt aus der Gestalt der Knienden ... ‘Ich gehe Gott entgegen, sprach die Flamme’ ...Diese Gestalt bedarf nicht mehr der Engelsfittiche, um aufzuschweben.”

18   The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (October/November 1942); cited in Lazlo Glozer, “Der Fall Lehmbruck,” in Westkunst: Zeitgendssische Kunst seit 1939, (Cologne: DuMont, 1981), 49-51. See also Walter Grasskamp, Die unbewältigte Moderne: Kunst und Öffentlichkeit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989), 99-100.

19   Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 51.

20   Jean Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, 2 vols. (1949; reprint, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1973), 1: 32. Beuys bought and read the book shortly after its appearance. It is today located in the Nachlass Joseph Beuys. Eva Beuys, conversation with the author, May 1995.

21   Beuys and Jappe, note 9, 76-77. “Da hatte ich mir die [Bücher und Kunstkataloge] durchgesehen nochmal, manches hatte ich schon gelesen ...aber da war eine Abbildung von einem Torso von Lehmbruck.”

22   As indicated in note 10, Westheim’s book had already gone into its second printing in 1922. The other ‘catalogue-type’ book could have been August Hoff’s, ‘Wilhelm Lehmbruck: Seine Sendung und Sein Werk (1936).

23   Westheim, 2nd ed., 1922, 9; Hoff, 1933, note 10, 15; Hoff, note 10, 1936, p.15: “Lehmbrucks Werk istTorso geblieben.”

24   The work belongs to the nachlaß, Joseph Beuys.

25   Walter Passarge and Julius Meier-Graefe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, exh. cat., Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlungen der Stadt Düsseldorf, Summer 1949,

26   See the photograph of Torso dated 1945-1951 in Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys (Cologne: Dumont, 1994), 25. The earlier date attached to this sculpture is probably based upon documentation in the Nachlass Joseph Beuys.

27   See the Lebenslauf that Beuys drafted in connection with his application for a professorship at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf dated 7 March 1961 and reprinted in Transit: Joseph Beuys Plastische Arbeiten 1947-1985, exh. cat., Krefeld: Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, 17 November 1991-16 February 1992, 38.

28   Johannes Stiittgen, conversation with the author, 3 January 1997.

29   “Das aussergewöhliche Werk Wilhelm Lehmbrucks rührt eine Schwellensituation des plastischen Begriffes an... wo er einen Kulminationspunkt gesetzt hat, der scheinbar über diese Höhe, nach dieser Art von Mass gegen Mass im Raum, nicht mehr entwicklungsfähig war.”

30   See, Meier Graefe, 1987, note 8, 2: 581: “Das Fragment, das er zurücklässt, hält uns in Spannung.” (The fragment that he left behind holds us in suspense).

31   "Adriani, Konnertz, and Thomas, note 26, 19.

32   See, Gerhard Kaldewei, “Unsere Arbeit war nicht umsonst,” in Getlinger Photographiert Beuys 1950-1963, 1990, note 6, 9.

33   Hoff, 1933, note 10, 19: “Lehmbruck musste ohne unmittelbare Nachfolge bleiben ...Vielleicht findet er erst in einer kommenden Generation die rechte Nachfolge.” Moreover, if Beuys read the 1932 text by Julius Meier-Graefe about Lehmbruck, which was reprinted in the 1949 Düsseldorf exhibition catalogue of Lehmbruck’s work, he may have taken note of this comment: “Ich sah in Lehmbruck einen Nachfolger und irrte mich. Marées siedelte sich in Hesperien an, Lehmbruck blieb Gast.” (I saw in Lehmbruck a successor and erred. Marees settled down in Hesperien. Lehmbruck remained a guest). See, Kunstsammlungen der Stadt Düsseldorf, 1949, note 25, unpaginated.

34   See Beuys’s statement, reprinted in Adriani, Konnertz, and Thomas, note 26, 6: “mein ganzes Leben war Werbung aber man sollte sich einmal dafür interessieren, wofür ich geworben habe.” (My whole life was campaigning, but one should for once be interested in for what I had applied).

35   Dr. Guido de Verd, Director Museum Kurhaus Kleve, conversation with the author, January 1997.

36   See Beuys’s statement from his Lebenslauf, 7 March 1961 in Transit, 1991-92, note 27, 38: “Um 1955 Umbruch in der künstlerischen Entwicklung” (Around 1955 upheaval in artistic development).

37   Beuys, “Unmittelbar ging mir die Idee auf, eine Intuition also: Skulptur - mit der Skuptur ist etwas zu machen. Alles ist Skulptur, rief mir quasi dieses Bild zu,” note 1.

38   Joseph Beuys Untitled 1943 in Die Soziale Plastik, exh. cat., Naples: Accademie di Belle Arti di Napoli, 5 June-10 July 1987, unpaginated.

39   Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (London: Penguin Books, 1983), [261-298].

40   Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Unähnlichkeit und Figuration, trans. Andreas Knop (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1995), 210.

41   Johann Gottfried Herder, “Plastik,” in Werke in Zwei Bände (1770°, reprint, 2 vols., Munich: Carl Hanser, 1953), 1: 681.

42   Joseph Beuys and Erhard Kluge, “Ich will gestalten, also verändern,” in Vorwärts (1 February 1986), No. 5, 19.

43   Beuys, “dass Plastik alles ist,” note 1. Lehmbruck, “Skulptur ist das Wesen der Dinge,” in Hoff, 1933, note 10, 20.

44   On Herder see, Bernhard Rupprecht, “Plastisches Ideal, Symbol und der Bilderstreit Goethezeit,” in Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963), 210-11.

45   Beuys cited by Peter Schata, “Das Oeuvre des Joseph Beuys: Ein individueller Ansatz zu universeller Neugestaltung,” in Volker Harlan, Rainer Rappmann, and Peter Schata, Soziale Plastik. Materialen zu Joseph Beuys (Achberg: Achberger Verlag, 1984), 83.

46   For Lehmbruck’s concern with Hölderlin see, Ursula Perucchi-Petri, “Die Fallenden und die Steigenden’ Zu einigen Zeichnungen aus Lehmbrucks Zürcher Zeit,” in Wilhelm Lehmbruck Zeichnungen, exh. cat., Zürich: Kunsthaus, 22 May-15 July 1990, 34-35. Concerning his interest in the Pygmalion legend, see Schubert, note 75 85-88. Beuys’s interest in Hölderlin dates to 1934-39, Beuys and his public recited the first two strophes of Hölderlin’s poem Friedensfeier at the beginning of his action Friedensfeier carried out with Jonas Hafner in Mönchengladbach on 31 March 1972. See also the photograph of Beuys standing before the Hölderlin Tower in Tübingen, dated 1985. All in Adriani, Konnertz, and Thomas, note 26, 14, 125, 203.

47   Beuys, “Ich möchte also mich auf die Seite stellen, auf der Wilhelm Lehmbruck gelebt hat und gestorben ist und wo er jeden einzelnen Menschen versehen hat mit dieser inneren Botschaft: ‘Schütze die Flamme..’,” note 1.

48   Nicola Vaccai, Metodo Pratico di canto italiano per camera diviso in 15 lezioni (1832; reprint; 1942). I am indebted to Dieter Koepplin for directing my attention to this source.

49   Herder, note 41, 721: “Eben das ist das so ungemein Sichere und Feste bei einer Bildsäule, dass, weil sie Mensch und ganz durchlebter Körper ist, sie als Tat zu uns spricht, uns festhalt und durchdringend unser Wesen, das ganze Saitenspiel menschlicher Mitempfindung wecket.”

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