A journey through the roots of German modernity and the artists’ imprint on public art
Text and drawings by Gianluca Costantini
The first place to go in Düsseldorf to begin understanding Joseph Beuys’s relationship with the city is undoubtedly the K20 of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. It is a museum with an extraordinary collection, one that leaves you genuinely astonished: vast spaces, landmark works, and a fascinating history. The Kunstsammlung was founded in 1961, when Beuys was already in his forties.
The collection began with the acquisition of 88 works by Paul Klee, a move that was anything but neutral. It was not simply a curatorial decision, but a deliberate political act, intended to assert that modernity had not been a mistake and that the art banned by National Socialism had to return to the center of public life.
After 1945, Germany was forced to confront the rupture produced by Nazism not only politically and socially, but also artistically. Entire decades of modern art had been erased, banned, and ridiculed under the label Entartete Kunst—“degenerate art.”
Paul Klee embodied that broken modernity in an exemplary way. One of the central figures of European twentieth-century art and a former Bauhaus master, Klee was dismissed from his teaching post in 1933, at a time when he held a professorship at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His works were removed from German museums and in part destroyed. When he died in Switzerland in 1940, he had never witnessed a public rehabilitation of his work in Germany.
The acquisition, significant also from a financial point of view, sparked intense debate. Yet it was precisely this controversy that clarified the meaning of the initiative: to officially recognize modernity as a foundation of Germany’s new democratic culture. Art was no longer to serve ideology, but to exist as a critical, open, and pluralistic space.
The purchase of the 88 works made clear the need for an appropriate institutional framework. This led to the creation of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, established as a public foundation with the task of preserving, studying, and exhibiting twentieth-century art. Klee was not merely the first major name in the collection; he became its organizing principle, its symbolic and historical point of departure.
In the following years, the collection expanded to include artists such as Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Matisse, Pollock, and Joseph Beuys, yet Klee’s role remained central. To this day, the Düsseldorf holdings are considered one of the most important public collections of Paul Klee’s work worldwide.
Walking through the galleries, I stop in front of a painting by Max Beckmann, The Iron Footbridge. For a moment I think I am looking at a view of Düsseldorf, one of its bridges, only to discover later that the city depicted is Frankfurt. And yet, the painting could stand for many other German cities I have visited. It is dense, compelling, charged with tension. Beckmann, too, lived in Düsseldorf. He never met Joseph Beuys in person—when Beckmann died, Beuys was still a student at the Academy. And yet Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, and Joseph Beuys all taught at the Düsseldorf Academy, walked the same corridors, inhabited the same symbolic space of the city.
At a certain point, in a small room, a work by Beuys appears: The End of the XXth Century (1983). The piece is connected to 7000 Oaks, the project Beuys presented at Documenta in Kassel in 1982, where he piled up 7,000 basalt blocks in front of an exhibition building, each intended to be paired over time with the planting of a new oak tree. In 1988, Beuys brought 65 of these basalt blocks back to Düsseldorf, using them to create a series of associative installations.
The five basalt blocks in The End of the XXth Century are not left intact. From each block a conical core has been extracted, wrapped in felt and clay, and then reinserted. The human intervention in nature is made visible through the wound inflicted on the material itself. The damage is soothed, but not healed. Scattered across the room, the blocks form a dark, almost memorial-like image, forcing us to reflect on our treatment of nature and on human responsibility.
This work functions as a kind of prelude to the most important room dedicated to Beuys, which houses Palazzo Regale—an artwork so central that it requires its own text and deeper reflection. I will return to it elsewhere.
I leave the museum. Every time I exit the K20, I feel filled with a strange surge of energy. I walk toward the restaurant where I eat almost every evening, the Hirschchen, on Alt-Pempelfort 2. Just before arriving, on an otherwise anonymous street, I find myself standing in front of a plaque stating that Paul Klee once lived in that very house. It might seem like a coincidence. I do not believe in coincidences. Today I am inside the veins of Düsseldorf, and I feel that Beuys is walking with me.
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.
Read also:
- The Bishop’s Door: Beuys, Mataré, and the Echo of History,
A story of mentorship, postwar reconstruction, and the symbolic power of a mirror. Link - Joseph Beuys: The Only Oak in Düsseldorf,
Memory and social sculpture in the urban heart Link
