Joseph Beuys was one of the most significant figures in the development of European art in the 20th century. As a performance artist and teacher, he influenced a generation of artists who, even today in the 21st century, continue to push artistic boundaries thanks to his ideas. Beuys’s extensive and diverse body of work, which includes sculpture, drawing, and performance, is deeply rooted in humanism, social philosophy, and anthroposophy. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century, and he famously declared that “everyone is an artist.” Beuys was born on 12 May 1921 in Krefeld and later moved to Kleve, on the German-Dutch border. In 1940, he began studying medicine, but his studies were interrupted when he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe. During a mission, he was seriously injured when his plane crashed in Crimea. He was rescued by a nomadic group of Tatars, who cared for him and wrapped him in fat and felt before he was found by a German search party. These organic substances later became materials he repeatedly returned to—charged, in his work, with almost mystical healing powers. After returning from the war, Beuys chose a new path away from home and medicine. In 1947, he entered the “Monumental Sculpture” program at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he studied under Joseph Enseling and Ewald Mataré; in 1951, he was admitted to Mataré’s master class, where he began developing his own techniques and forms of expression. The 1950s were a difficult period for Beuys: he struggled to establish himself artistically, but during these years of self-doubt he pursued scientific studies and drew intensively. In 1961, Beuys was appointed professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy. His teaching style was unique: he saw the exchange of ideas and the pursuit of knowledge as a fundamental task of the artist. Beuys was dismissed in 1972 because he refused to limit the number of students in his classes and accepted students who had failed the entrance examination. Performances—or “actions,” as Beuys called them—were at the center of his work. One of his earliest performances, at Galerie Schmela in 1965, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, radically changed the boundaries of what could be defined as art. Other famous actions such as I Like America and America Likes Me, which took place in New York in 1974, consolidated his international reputation. The end of his teaching career in Germany allowed Beuys to travel. He visited the Edinburgh International Festival several times and also traveled to Dublin, where he followed in the footsteps of James Joyce. His time in the British Isles led to exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, the ICA, and the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1976, Beuys represented the Federal Republic of Germany at the Venice Biennale. From 1964 onward, he was regularly invited to documenta, where in 1982 he initiated a major action in which 7,000 oak trees were planted. In 1978, Beuys became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. His first retrospective took place in 1979 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, followed by further major solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia in 1982 and the Seibu Museum in 1984. In January 1986, Beuys received the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize in Duisburg. He died shortly afterward in his Düsseldorf studio from a serious lung disease. Since his death, Beuys’s work has been honored in the United Kingdom with solo exhibitions at Tate Liverpool (1993), the Royal Academy of Arts (1999), and Tate Modern (2005).