Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, a city in northwestern Germany near the Dutch border. He grew up in the nearby towns of Kleve and Rindern, the only child in a middle class, strongly Catholic family. During his youth he pursued dual interests in the natural sciences and art, and he chose a career in medicine. In 1940 he joined the military, volunteering in order to avoid the draft. He was trained as an aircraft radio operator and combat pilot, and during his years of active duty he was seriously wounded numerous times. At the end of the war he was held in a British prisoner-of-war camp for several months, and returned to Kleve in 1945. Coming to terms with his involvement in the war was a long process and figures, at least obliquely, in much of his artwork. Beuys often said that his interest in fat and felt as sculptural materials grew out of a wartime experience--a plane crash in the Crimea, after which he was rescued by nomadic Tartars who rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt to heal and warm his body. While the story appears to have little grounding in real events (Beuys himself downplayed its importance in a 1980 interview), its poetics are strong enough to have made the story one of the most enduring aspects of his mythic biography. On his return from the war Beuys abandoned his plans for a career in medicine and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture. He graduated in 1952, and during the next years focused on drawing--he produced thousands during the 1950s alone--and reading, ranging freely through philosophy, science, poetry, literature, and the occult. He married in 1959 and two years later, at the age of 40, was appointed to a professorship at his alma mater. During the early 1960s, Düsseldorf developed into an important center for contemporary art and Beuys became acquainted with the experimental work of artists such as Nam June Paik and the Fluxus group, whose public "concerts" brought a new fluidity to the boundaries between literature, music, visual art, performance, and everyday life. Their ideas were a catalyst for Beuys' own performances, which he called "actions," and his evolving ideas about how art could play a wider role in society. He began to publicly exhibit his large-scale sculptures, small objects, drawings, and room installations. He also created numerous actions and began making editioned objects and prints called multiples. As the decades advanced, his commitment to political reform increased and he was involved in the founding of several activist groups: in 1967, the German Student Party, whose platform included worldwide disarmament and educational reform; in 1970, the Organization for Direct Democracy by Referendum, which proposed increased political power for individuals; and in 1972, the Free International University, which emphasized the creative potential in all human beings and advocated cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines. In 1979 he was one of 500 founding members of the Green Party. His charismatic presence, his urgent and public calls for reform of all kinds, and his unconventional artistic style (incorporating ritualized movement and sound, and materials such as fat, felt, earth, honey, blood, and even dead animals) gained him international notoriety during these decades, but it also cost him his job. Beuys was dismissed in 1972 from his teaching position over his insistence that admission to the art school be open to anyone who wished to study there. While he counted debate, discussion, and teaching as part of his expanded definition of art, Beuys also continued to make objects, installations, multiples, and performances. His reputation in the international art world solidified after a 1979 retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum, and he lived the last years of his life at a hectic pace, participating in dozens of exhibitions and traveling widely on behalf of his organizations. Beuys died in 1986 in Düsseldorf. In the subsequent decade his students have carried on his campaign for change, and his ideas and artwork have continued to spark lively debate. FURTHER READING Adriani, Götz, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas. Joseph Beuys: Life and Works. Translated into English by Patricia Lech. Woodbury, New York: Barron's Educational Series, Inc., 1979. Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. Translated into English by David Britt. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Temkin, Ann. "Joseph Beuys: An Introduction to His Life and Work." In Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys. Philadelphia and New York: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, 1993.

Gabriel Orozco believes that "very simple gestures and actions" can transform any experience, even the most mundane, into a work of art. These actions often result in objects that either cease to exist or change over time. In this way, Orozco challenges the accepted definitions of art and artistic practices. The vast majority of his work, which varies broadly in media, results from slight interventions in or interactions with his immediate environment, whether a supermarket, a beach, the streets of a rural village, or an urban landscape. To make Piedra que cede (Yielding Stone), Orozco shaped nearly 150 pounds of plasticine (equal approximately to his own body weight) into a ball and pushed it through the streets of New York City. In the process, dirt and detritus from the streets were embedded in the surface of this malleable material. Orozco references many art-making traditions in this work: Arte Povera's recycling of prosaic materials, Earth Art's exploration of sites beyond the gallery or museum, and the engagement of the artist's own body in performance art.

"The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."--Andy Warhol, 1975 For Warhol and fellow Pop artists, reproducing images from popular culture was the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude they regarded as characteristic of the 1960s. Like droning newscasts, repetition dissipates meaning and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb. Warhol created 16 Jackies in response to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event whose mass-media coverage reached an unparalleled number of people. The four images of Jacqueline Kennedy, each repeated four times, were enlargements of news photographs that appeared widely and continually in the media after the assassination. Taken from issues of Life magazine, the images depict, from top to bottom: Jackie stepping off the plane upon arrival at Love Field in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and smiling in the limousine before the assassination. 16 Jackies combines a number of themes important in Warhol's work, such as his fascination with American icons and celebrities, his interest in the mass media and the dissemination of imagery, and his preoccupation with death.

Although Warhol was already impressed with the glamour of Jackie Kennedy by 1962,1 he was unmoved by the news of John Kennedy's assassination the following year. He later recalled: I heard the news over the radio when I was alone painting in my studio. I don't think I missed a stroke. I wanted to know what was going on out there, but that was the extent of my reaction.... Henry Geldzahler wanted to know why I wasn't more upset, so I told him about the time I was walking in India and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died and how I realized then that everything was just how you decided to think about it. I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get away from the thing.... John Quinn, the playwright ... was moaning over and over, "But Jackie was the most glamorous First Lady we'll every get."2 For Warhol, the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude he regarded as characteristic of the 1960s in general,3 was through the replication of images. Like the droning repetition of newscasts, the device dissipates meaning, and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb: "The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."4 The sixteen faces of Jackie Kennedy in Warhol's painting were blown up from four news photos that appeared ubiquitously in the media after the assassination. From top to bottom, the images are of Jackie smiling at Love Field on arrival in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for L.B.J. on Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and in the limousine before the shooting. The top three appeared in the 24 November and 6 December 1963 issues of Life magazine: the first by an unidentified photographer; the second and third by Cecil Stoughton and Fred Ward, respectively; the source for the bottom one has not been identified, although a U.P.I. photograph similar to it was reproduced in Newsweek. Eventually, in Warhol's view, these images became so familiar that neutral identification is all that the viewer experiences. Warhol make this point by repeating each of the four image of Jackie four times, in a simple well-designed non-sequential alternation of strips of "before and after" pictures. The high-contrast, low-information pictures, each as different from the others as one reproduction from another, are cropped to focus on Jackie's face, rhythmically directed one way along one row and then the other along the next. A deliberately careless look gives the painting a sense of chance and hurry, suggesting the quick duplication and dissemination of images.5 Additionally, expressivity is, in a sense, absent from the images themselves. Public expectation forces the face of the politician's wife into a perpetual, meaningless smile, while shock renders the widow as inexpressive and numb as one of Warhol's somnambulant superstars. The two faces, perceived by Warhol as equally unreal, have been further sapped of meaning by the mythologizing American culture and the techniques of reproduction, and are finally emptied of meaning by the artist's stylization. 1 See Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, PoPism: The Warhol '60s (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 36. 2 Ibid., p. 60. 3 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 27. 4 Warhol, PoPism, p. 50. It is interesting to note that 16 Jackies ignited the passion of a vandal who inscribed the words "HOGWASH/USA" on the panel third from the top on the leftmost column and "BLACK" on the panel second from the top on the rightmost column in ballpoint pen in November 1967; the inscriptions were successfully removed by Daniel Goldreyer in New York by late January 1968. 5 Warhol describes the silkscreening process he used, which allowed him to turn the work of reproducing the design over to Gerard Malanga and other assistants: "You pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple-quick and chancy;" Warhol, PoPism, p. 22.

"I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad."--Andy Warhol After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Andy Warhol began his series of "Jackie paintings" in response to the media blitz that followed the incident. 16 Jackies is a grid of four different images based on news photos of Jacqueline Kennedy from international press coverage of JFK's death. As in Brillo Boxes (1964/1969, also on view here), the artist elevates commercial iconography to the status of fine art. In so doing, Warhol allows his viewer to consider the overlap of things that American culture values: wealth and success, human emotion, and artistic expression.

"Art interests me very much, but truth interests me infinitely more."--Alberto Giacometti Born into a family of artists, Alberto Giacometti began his study of drawing, painting, and sculpting at a young age. His father, a well-known painter, sent him to study in Geneva, Italy, and then Paris, where after several years he left the academy to explore nontraditional ideas and forms. He was drawn to the Surrealist experimentation with the human subconscious as expression of art. Influenced by these ideas, Giacometti began working from memory and imagination rather than copying from nature. By this time, sculpture had emerged as his main artistic passion, although he never stopped drawing and made a name for himself as a superior draftsman. Buste de Diego (Bust of Diego) is a portrait of the artist's brother, who remained Giacometti's main model, studio assistant, and close friend throughout his artistic career. This bust of Diego demonstrates Giacometti's interest in distorting the scale of the human figure--the narrow head sits on a spindly neck attached to the massive broad shoulders that weigh the sculpture down. This elongated figure standing alone in the space evokes an atmosphere of isolation or loneliness, a feeling common in Giacometti's sculptures, which have been interpreted as symbols of human spiritual alienation.

Gabriel Orozco believes that "very simple gestures and actions" can transform any experience, even the most mundane, into a work of art. These actions often result in objects that either cease to exist or change over time. In this way, Orozco challenges the accepted definitions of art and artistic practices. The vast majority of his work, which varies broadly in media, results from slight interventions in or interactions with his immediate environment, whether a supermarket, a beach, the streets of a rural village, or an urban landscape. To make Piedra que cede (Yielding Stone), Orozco shaped nearly 150 pounds of plasticine (equal approximately to his own body weight) into a ball and pushed it through the streets of New York City. In the process, dirt and detritus were embedded in the surface of this malleable material. Orozco references many art-making traditions in this work: the recycling of ordinary materials, exploration of art spaces beyond the gallery or museum, and the engagement of the artist's own body in performance art.

The Artwork of the Month's activity and label focus on a single work in the Walker's collection and provide entertaining art experiences for young people. You can see an activity with the ArtsConnectEd image viewer or download the PDF file to your computer. Use the Prev/Next buttons to move between images of the PDF and the actual file.

The Artwork of the Month's activity and label focus on a single work in the Walker's collection and provide entertaining art experiences for young people. You can see an activity with the ArtsConnectEd image viewer or download the PDF file to your computer. Use the Prev/Next buttons to move between images of the PDF and the actual file. About the Artwork Warhol made 16 Jackies in response to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The woman depicted is Jacqueline Kennedy, the president’s wife. The top and bottom photographs were taken moments before her husband’s death, and the two pictures in the middle were taken shortly afterward. The president’s death and its affect on his family and the country was widely covered in the news broadcasts around the world. People were glued to their television sets for days, watching many of the same scenes again and again as they waited for further details about the tragedy.

Tour participants explore both traditional and nontraditional portraiture. Viewers begin to understand that a portrait need not be a likeness of a person in order to be an effective representation. This activity could be used in the Walker Art Center galleries, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, or in the classroom with a selection of images from Art Collector. The artworks included in the activity are suggestions only and instructors may choose different artworks to accompany the discussion questions. This activity comes from the Living in Our Time section of the Tour Guide Tool Kit.