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Joseph Beuys (German. Joseph Beuys may 12, 1921, Krefeld, Germany — January 23, 1986, düsseldorf, Germany) was a German painter, one of the leaders of postmodernism.

Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld (North Rhine — Westphalia) may 12, 1921 in the family of a merchant. He spent his childhood in Kleve, near the Dutch border. During the Second world war he served in aviation. The beginning of his "personal mythology", where fact is inseparable from the symbol, was the winter of 1943, when his plane was shot down over the Crimea. Frosty "the Tatar steppe", as well as melted fat and felt, which locals rescued him, maintaining bodily heat, predetermined shaped structure of his future works. Returning to the ranks, fought also in Holland. In 1945 was captured by the British. In 1947-1951 studied at the Academy of arts in düsseldorf, where his main mentor was the sculptor E. Matara. The artist, which received in 1961 the title of Professor at the Düsseldorf art Academy, was fired in 1972 after together with not accepted by the students in protest "occupied" by its Secretariat. In 1978, the Federal court found the dismissal unlawful, but the boys had not accepted professors, trying to be as independent as possible from the state. In the Wake of the left opposition, he published a Manifesto on "social sculpture" (1978), expressing the anarcho-utopian principle of "direct democracy" designed to replace the existing bureaucratic mechanisms the sum of the free creative expression of individuals and collectives. In 1983, announced his candidacy in the elections to the Bundestag (list "green"), but was defeated. Beuys died in düsseldorf on 23 January 1986. After the master's death every Museum of modern art sought to establish one of his art objects in plain sight in the form of honor memorial. The largest and at the same time the most characteristic of these memorials is the unit of work in the Museum of Hesse in Darmstadt — the Suite of rooms, reproducing the atmosphere boltovskoy workshop, full of symbolic blanks from rolls of pressed felt to petrified sausages.