Joseph Beuys' bathtub

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bathtub
Joseph Beuys , 1960

[ Bathtub ( Memento from October 31, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ) Link to the picture]
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Joseph Beuys' bathtub , actually "untitled (bathtub)" (1960), 100 × 100 × 45 cm, is an art object by Joseph Beuys .

history

The baby bathtub , covered with adhesive plaster , gauze bandages , grease and copper wire , first publicly exhibited in 1968 or 1969 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy , was part of the traveling exhibition "Reality - Realism - Reality" from 1972 to 1973, along with other works by Beuys on loan from the art collector Lothar Schirmer municipal museums, including the Wuppertal Von der Heydt Museum as borrower and the Municipal Museum for Modern Art Leverkusen . A plaque bore the note that the infant Joseph Beuys was once bathed in this vessel. This was supplemented by strangers with the words "Apparently too hot".

For the exhibition at Morsbroich Castle , the work went to Leverkusen and was stored there because the exhibition was still to be set up. The SPD local association Leverkusen-Alkenrath celebrated a party on November 3, 1973 in this museum. Two SPD members, Hilde Müller and Marianne Klein, were looking for a bowl to wash glasses and discovered the bathtub, which was apparently soiled with adhesive plasters and gauze bandages , without realizing that the materials made it a work of art. “We thought we could clean the old thing nicely and use it to wash our glasses in it,” they remember, “we couldn't use it the way it looked. That's why we scrubbed the tub. "

This sparked a scandal; Beuys was not enthusiastic. Schirmer initially only thought of comparing the defaced object with a “shaved cactus”. The city of Wuppertal as borrower was sued by Schirmer and sentenced in 1976 by the regional court of Wuppertal in the first instance to DM 40,000 and by the higher regional court of Düsseldorf in the second instance to DM 58,000 in damages; Schirmer was also awarded the bathtub. On behalf of Schirmer, Beuys tried to restore the bathtub as a work of art in Munich in 1977, using all available photographs and using the original materials, insofar as they were still available. As a gift from Lothar Schirmer, the tub became part of the Beuys collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2013 .

A similar fate befell Beuys' Fettecke in 1986 in his former studio, room 3 of the Düsseldorf Art Academy , which was removed by the caretaker of the academy after the artist's death. A doll that Beuys had created as a play sculpture for the schoolyard of the Düsseldorf Rolandschule in the early 1960s was also ruined a little later.

reception

The event has gone down in the contemporary treasure trove of anecdotes , was widely reported in the media and told in different versions. For example, there was a work by Beuys in a museum that consisted of a bathtub with rubbish. Cleaning ladies would have cleaned this tub before a vernissage while cleaning it without realizing that it was a work of art.

In 1975, an advertising film for the abrasive ATA contributed significantly to the so-called “cleaning woman legend”, in which two typical cleaning women with headscarves, smocks and cleaning buckets scrub a bathtub in a whitewashed room with abstract paintings in a museum of modern art. The artist comes in and the two women ask: "Well, master, is it shiny?", After which the artist raises his arms in the air in horror. At the end of this commercial you can hear the final chord: “Ata, thorough, one way or the other”.

The story is occasionally used in media coverage as an example of the fact that contemporary art is not always recognizable as art at first glance and is sometimes indistinguishable from garbage. It was picked up and re-enacted in a 1983 commercial for cleaning agents.

In the history competition of the Federal President "Annoyance, sensation, outrage: Scandals in history" 2010/2011, a group of students from a high school won a prize with this story.

literature

  • Eugen Blume, Cathrine Nichols (ed.): Beuys. We are the revolution. Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, October 3, 2008 to January 25, 2009. Steidl, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-88609-649-7 .
  • Johann Braun: Art processes from Menzel to Beuys. 2nd Edition. Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58901-0 , chapter 3.
  • Harald Keller: When cleaning women rage in the museum. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 18, 2008, No. 66, p. 40.
  • Lothar Schirmer (ed.), Alain Bohrer (introductory): Joseph Beuys. An overview of the works, 1945–1985. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich / Paris / London 1996, ISBN 3-88814-810-3 .
  • Helmut Friedel, Lothar Schirmer (ed.): Joseph Beuys in the Lenbachhaus and donation from Lothar Schirmer. Schirmer Mosel, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-8296-0629-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Friedel, Lothar Schirmer (ed.): Joseph Beuys in the Lenbachhaus and donation from Lothar Schirmer. P. 36.
  2. ↑ Helmut Friedel, Lothar Schirmer (ed.): Joseph Beuys in the Lenbachhaus and donation from Lothar Schirmer. P. 42.
  3. ↑ a b Shaved Cactus . In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1975 ( online ).
  4. ↑ leverkusener-anzeiger.ksta.de: Outrage on Beuys' Kunstwanne. ( Memento of November 6, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) March 19, 2009.
  5. ↑ Eugen Blume, Cathrine Nichols (ed.): Beuys. We are the revolution. P. 223.
  6. ↑ Heiner Stachelhaus: Joseph Beuys . Heyne, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-453-03399-X , p. 187 .
  7. ↑ a b Helmut Friedel, Lothar Schirmer (ed.): Joseph Beuys in the Lenbachhaus and donation from Lothar Schirmer. P. 43.
  8. ↑ However, Schirmer was no longer able to find the colored plaster originally used. So Beuys decided to use a different plaster and to color it with enamel paint. - See "Attraction and repulsion at the same time" . Interview between Susanne Führer and Lothar Schirmer in a contribution from May 12, 2011 in the deutschlandradiokultur.de portal , accessed on September 13, 2015
  9. ^ Lenbachhaus: Introduction to the 'Joseph Beuys' collection. Retrieved May 29, 2013.
  10. ^ Johanna Lutteroth: Scandal about the Beuys bathtub: Gescheuerte Kunst . In: Spiegel Online . December 9, 2011 ( spiegel.de [accessed September 14, 2019]).
  11. ↑ Video of the ATA advertisement (1987) on YouTube
  12. ^ Lürzer's archive. No. 1, 1984. Lürzer, Frankfurt am Main, ISSN  0175-3436 , p. 54.
  13. ^ Johanna Lutteroth: Scandal about the Beuys bathtub - Gescheuerte Kunst. In: one day. December 9, 2011.