In/Tuition: a seminar's engagement with Joseph Beuys

This exhibition is a result of a seminar on Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) offered last spring in Harvard’s Fine Arts Department and led by the exhibition organizer, Peter Nisbet, the Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The works in the exhibition were drawn from a virtually complete set of the artist’s multiples (editioned objects and prints) recently acquired by the Busch-Reisinger as part of the Willy and Charlotte Reber collection. Over the two decades before his death, Beuys produced some 600 multiples, which reflect, reference, or revisit most of the artist’s manifold activities, procedures, and concerns in some way. Thirty-seven works have been selected for the exhibition which will concentrate on the perception and experience of the exhibited object, its problematic status as a work of art presented in a museum, and on the process of coming to terms with the interrelations of grouped pieces. Thus In/Tuition is not intended as a survey of Beuys’ extensive and multifarious career, but is conceived as one part of the Busch-Reisinger’s long-term engagement with the artist’s work.

In/Tuition is made possible by the Harvard University Art Museums’ Ernst A. Teves and Jose Soriano Funds.

With the help of the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger, the Art Museums have co-published with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis the first English translation of the eighth edition of Joseph Beuys Multiples, the German catalogue raisonné edited by Jörg Schellmann. This revised edition contains lists of the multiples by Beuys in the collections of the Busch-Reisinger, the Walker, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the three largest repositories of Beuys’ multiples in the world.