Blackboards 1972 and 1978

Beuys regarded teaching as an essential element of his work as an artist. He was a profoundly charismatic and inspirational professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where he taught a generation of German artists. Beuys’s relationship with the authorities at the academy was always stormy, and he was dismissed in 1972. However, by then he was expounding his theories of sculpture, democracy and green politics at conferences and art galleries around the world. These lectures were closer in spirit to Actions than to traditional academic practice, and the blackboards that he invariably covered in idiosyncratic diagrams and Beuysian slogans have come to be regarded as works in their own right. Several of the blackboards shown here are preserved from Beuys’s lectures at the Tate Gallery in 1972, which were described by the critic Caroline Tisdall as ‘a blend of art, politics, personal charisma, paradox and Utopian proposition’.