Anyone who stands in front of the canvas in Duisburg's Lehmbruck Museum with the speech by Joseph Beuys, which he gave there on January 12, 1986, can hardly believe it: Lucid, with only one stumble, Beuys speaks long, freely and pointedly about his artistic influences and Beliefs.

He died eleven days later at the age of only 64.

Beuys 'speech was also surprising because he named Wilhelm Lehmbruck, who had passed away in 1919, two years before Beuys' birth, as his teacher and expressly thanked him.

The illustration of one of his works triggered an initial spark for him at a young age: "Everything is sculpture, this picture called out to me, so to speak."

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the features section.

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Establishing a teacher relationship with Lehmbruck and thus ignoring the actual master Ewald Mataré was a surprise. But Beuys is just as right as Duisburg is now to make this elective affinity comprehensible with an abundance of beguiling drawings and sculptures by both artists.

The most banal parallels are quickly made out: Lehmbruck and Beuys are equally strongly influenced by Rudolf Steiner, which is illustrated in the exhibition, which is concentrated in just seven rooms, using Beuys' slates on their easels between teaching materials and puzzling visual cosmos, while Lehmbruck's early stage the incipient tendency to spiritualize and Gothic elongation of his figures and thereby exaggeration to a large extent can be derived from Steiner's ideas.

The "hearing, thinking, willing" were three pillars in Beuys' work, all three key concepts are to be regarded as Lehmbruck's basic themes without distortion.

Insightful failure as an opportunity - for healing

One of the key similarities is the basic belief that failure is an opportunity for healing, mediated through art and culture. Both tried to transform their traumatizations and wounds from the war, with Lehmbruck the First World War, with Beuys the Second, into art. A more non-warlike “war memorial” than Lehmbruck's “fallen man” with his dagger in hand cannot be imagined. An untitled installation by Beuys from 1971 is set up diagonally behind it to just-look together. A bronze cross with aureole lies like a seal on a wooden ammunition box, over which a brutally trimmed spruce with a mountain lamp rises diagonally. Here, as is so often the case with Beuys, nature is the substitute for someone “fallen” in the war, the spruce specifically for him stands for death,the cross in general for life and salvation. The abstract-symbolic sculpture thus resembles the Lehmbruck figure in front of it in terms of content and form. His poignantly painted “Pietà” on the wall opposite, in turn, offers the injured person a bowl in her lap as a sign of energy supply. A narrow streak of light emerges in front of her dark chest, just like in Beuys' installation from the sun cross radially flames radiate as a symbol of life-giving warmth.just like in Beuys' installation from the sun cross, flames radiate radially as a symbol of life-giving warmth.just like in Beuys' installation from the sun cross, flames radiate radially as a symbol of life-giving warmth.

After war disasters, people are often quickly forgotten and a "zero hour" is installed, from which everything should be created anew and without any connection to what was before. Lehmbruck and Beuys, however, vehemently opposed such artificial zero-setting, wanted to continue to show the old wounds and not hide them unhealed. Just as the former admired the Gothic for its ability to visualize the most abstract facts in disembodied bodies - for example in the form of the mother of a pietà, who is the same age as her physically almost vanished son in order to be his sponsa, bride - so Beuys stepped up after the war for figurative art and against the flight into non-representational. He develops new symbols from traditional iconographies,which are by no means - as is often claimed - hermetic and indistinguishable. On the contrary: in essence, there are just a few basic and material iconographies that Beuys constantly varies. The trick is that the viewer can understand the new arrangements and can and must think the openly unfinished work through to the end.