Joseph Beuys remains one of the most polarizing figures in 20th-century art, a former Nazi soldier who reinvented himself as a shamanic healer and a founding member of the Green Party. A new monographic study by art historian Daniel Spaulding, 'Joseph Beuys and History', re-evaluates the artist's legacy by confronting his refusal to apologize for his wartime past and his use of ambiguous materials like fat and felt. Spaulding argues that Beuys’s work should be read through the lens of 'bad faith,' where his utopian slogans masked a deep, unresolved engagement with the horrors of the Holocaust.
This analysis is significant as it challenges the long-standing 'shaman' myth Beuys cultivated, positioning his practice instead as a synecdoche for the failures of modernism and Germany's complex 'culture of remembrance.' By examining works like 'Fond III/3' and 'Tram Stop' through Spaulding’s critical framework, the art world is pushed to reconcile Beuys’s radical social theories with the disturbing historical vacuum at the center of his persona. The book represents a major shift in English-language scholarship, moving away from taking Beuys at his word toward a more rigorous interrogation of his material and political contradictions.