La Rivoluzione siamo Noi
1972
Silkscreen with handwritten text and stamp

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was born in Krefeld, Germany, and grew up during the Nazi Party’s rise to power, first joining the Hitler Youth, and in 1941, enlisting in the German Air Force. When his plane crashed on the Crimean Front in 1944, it provided the artist with the seeds of the story that proved to be one of his most fantastical and enduring creations. Bad weather forced the plane down, killing the pilot and injuring Beuys, who was rescued by a German search party and convalesced in a military hospital for several weeks.

In a fabulist feat, perhaps inspired by the effectiveness of the Nazi propaganda of his youth, Beuys later claimed he had been discovered by nomadic Tartar tribesmen who wrapped him in layers of animal fat and felt, and saved his life. The artist’s version of events became so widely accepted, it was published by The New York Times in his obituary in 1986. After the war, he became a professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and cultivated a distinctive fashion style—always wearing a fishing vest and felt hat—the latter both in a nod to his imagined saviors and to hide scars from injuries sustained in the crash.

As Beuys’s origin myth alchemically reinvented the trauma of his wartime experiences into a kind of artistic rebirth, he idealistically aimed to similarly transform the whole of post-war German society into a democratic utopia. He believed in creativity as a guiding principle—that both art and education were essential and a universal right for all—famously declaring that “every man is an artist.” He was an early practitioner of performance art. His intense and ritualistic actions included spending three hours explaining his art to a dead rabbit and living alone for a week with a wild coyote in a New York art gallery. He was an environmentalist decades ahead of his time; one of his most enduring performances was planting seven thousand oak trees in the countryside of his childhood.

The artwork, La rivoluzione siamo Noi [We Are the Revolution], is a silkscreen of a photograph taken by Giancarlo Pancaldi, which was first used on a poster for Beuys’s exhibition at Modern Art Agency in Naples in 1971—hence the Italian title. The concept of working in multiples was an essential facet of the artist’s work; his goal was to democratize access to his art by making it as available to as many people as possible.