Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way

Caroline Tisdall is one of the foremost experts on the artist Joseph Beuys, and this book represents both the culmination of thirty years of scholarship -- including fifteen years of close collaboration with the artist himself -- as well as the long awaited follow-up to her acclaimed monograph on Beuys for the 1979 Guggenheim retrospective she curated. The book's title refers to a phrase Beuys used repeatedly in his collaborations with Tisdall, and suggests a way forward through the often daunting complexity of Beuys's philosophy and art. Tisdall's formidable knowledge of her subject leads the reader through such diverse topics as Beuys's relationship to ecology, politics, shamanism, alchemy, botany, literature, economics, philosophy, and psychology. Tisdall's observations on Beuys's art reach a poetic simplicity rarely achieved in art criticism -- all the more remarkable given the multi-layered nature of this art. This book's text is complemented by more than 300 of Tisdall's own photographs, many of them previously unpublished.