A story of mentorship, postwar reconstruction, and the symbolic power of a mirror.
Text and drawings by Gianluca Costantini
In the summer of 2025, I returned to Cologne with the intention of seeing up close what Joseph Beuys had created under the guidance of the sculptor Ewald Mataré, his teacher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. The echo of that work resonates among the stones of the cathedral, among the mosaics and portals that have witnessed centuries of history and war.
In 1948, immediately after World War II, the city was a pile of rubble, yet the foundations and façade of the cathedral remained largely intact. On August 15 of that year, a celebration was planned for the 700th anniversary of the laying of the first stone. A solemn procession would enter through the central doors of the south transept portal. It was here that Mataré, tasked with restoring the doors, involved the young Beuys.
Beuys worked on the so-called “Bishop’s Door,” decorating the coat of arms of Cardinal Frings with mosaic tiles recovered from a villa destroyed near Düsseldorf. A black cross on a white background held a small piece of mirror at its center, a gesture almost minimal yet extraordinarily symbolic. In an interview many years later, Beuys recalled his teacher’s words: “Everything is borrowed, and everything must be returned.” He added: “I had to travel within myself, far back in time, to find those places where everything is expression and creation, where all men are artists.”
Thirty years later, in 1980, Beuys returned to those portals, by then an internationally renowned artist. For the exhibition “My Cologne Cathedral: Contemporary Artists See the Cologne Cathedral” at the Ludwig Museum, he created “Untitled (My Cologne Cathedral),” a four-part photographic work reproducing the cathedral’s four doors. Three of the photographs, three meters high, were artistically manipulated; on one, Beuys noted in bold letters that the mirror he had installed in 1948 was no longer present when the doors were photographed.
In the cathedral’s long history, Beuys’s lost mirror represents something unique: a bridge between the 13th-century Gothic period, the 19th-century Neo-Gothic completion, and the modern readymade, an everyday object transformed into art. But the magic of this union was short-lived: due to technical flaws, the mirror apparently disappeared soon after installation, replaced by a simple black stone, and Beuys only discovered this thirty years later.
Walking in front of the cathedral doors, I cannot help but reflect on the fragility and power of art: what seems ephemeral can become symbolic, what is lost can continue to live in memory and imagination. Beuys’s small, discreet shaving mirror remains a reminder: art is time returning itself, and every creative gesture is an act of resistance against oblivion.
This article is part of the research I am carrying out for the creation of a graphic novel dedicated to the life of Joseph Beuys. The articles recount some stages of the journeys I undertook in order to document my work.
