Leaf and lime on cardboard
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
ARTIST ROOMS
National Heritage Memorial Fund
Art Fund
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/joseph-beuys-747" aria-label="More by Joseph Beuys" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Joseph Beuys</a>
ARTIST ROOMS
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
abstraction
education, science and learning
irregular forms
leaf
lime
miscellaneous
non-representational
objects
plants and flowers
science
society
<p><span>Untitled</span> 1955 is a collage by the German artist Joseph Beuys. It comprises a single leaf, coloured red-brown, with the back of the leaf (the veins) showing. It is mounted next to a slightly larger regular oval shape coated in off-white lime-wash paint. The leaf is from the Copper Beech tree (or Purple Beech; <span>Fagus Sylvatica</span> ‘Purpurea’), which is commonplace throughout Europe, particularly in the north, including the forests of North Rhine Westphalia, where Beuys lived at the time he made this work. The beech is an ancient species, known in the modern variant in Germany since 1488. Placing the leaf next to the shape coated in lime-wash contrasts the organic with the mineral, the soft leaf with the hard lime-wash, and the natural shape of the leaf with the man-made geometric shape of the card.</p>
installation leaf lime cardboard
1 April 2010 – 27 September 2010
2010-09-27
1 April 2010 – 27 September 2010
2010-09-27
2010-04-01
Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (Glasgow, UK)
http://www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk
2010-04-01
ARTIST ROOMS 2010: Joseph Beuys
Loan-out
29 June 2019 – 27 October 2019
2019-10-27
29 June 2019 – 27 October 2019
2019-10-27
2019-06-29
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 2 (Edinburgh, UK)
2019-06-29
SNGMA Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage
Loan-out
Untitled
support: 302 × 244 mm
frame: 680 × 525 × 33 mm
<a href="/search?gid=999999788" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">ARTIST ROOMS</a>
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the <a href="/search?gid=999999967" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">National Heritage Memorial Fund</a> and the <a href="/search?gid=999999968" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Art Fund</a> 2008
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>Untitled</i> 1955 is a collage by the German artist Joseph Beuys. It comprises a single leaf, coloured red-brown, with the back of the leaf (the veins) showing. It is mounted next to a slightly larger regular oval shape coated in off-white lime-wash paint. The leaf is from the Copper Beech tree (or Purple Beech; <i>Fagus Sylvatica</i> ‘Purpurea’), which is commonplace throughout Europe, particularly in the north, including the forests of North Rhine Westphalia, where Beuys lived at the time he made this work. The beech is an ancient species, known in the modern variant in Germany since 1488. Placing the leaf next to the shape coated in lime-wash contrasts the organic with the mineral, the soft leaf with the hard lime-wash, and the natural shape of the leaf with the man-made geometric shape of the card.</p>
<p>Throughout his life Beuys was interested in all aspects of the natural world. As a boy he collected and catalogued biological specimens and produced watercolour paintings of his local area. Among the first works Beuys exhibited after the Second World War were drawings from nature. Beuys was keenly interested in ecology, and considered studying science before becoming an artist; he was to become a co-founder of the German Green Party in 1980. The period 1954–8, during which Beuys made this work, was one of personal crisis. He had graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1951, but had yet to gain success as an artist. He lived during most of this period with his friends Hans and Franz Joseph van der Grinten on their farm at Kranenburg, near the Reichswald forest, making various drawings and collages as well as working on the farm.</p>
<p>The tree and forest have played a key role in the formation of German identity since the legend of Arminius the Cheruscan, ‘Hermann’, who formed an alliance of Germanic tribes to defeat the Romans in the Battle of the Teutowald forest in the tenth century. Therefore Beuys’s allusion to the forest, through the leaf, tapped into a deep-rooted icon of German identity and is representative of Beuys’s search for his own identity as an artist in post-war Germany (see Weikop 2014, pp.30–47). With the simple act of attaching a leaf and a shape covered in lime-wash to a piece of paper, he captured the importance of nature to the German imagination, as well as the importance of the natural world in shaping human existence more broadly. These elements would inform his work in the decades ahead, resulting in Beuys’s ambitious plan to plant an artwork comprising several thousand trees – titled <i>7,000 Oaks</i> – in the German city of Kassel in 1981.</p>
<p>The leaf collage was not a new practice for Beuys. <i>Acer Platanoides</i> 1945 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-acer-platanoides-ar00630" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00630</span></a>), comprising a single Norway Maple leaf on paper, is the oldest work by Beuys in the ARTIST ROOMS collection and one of the earliest works of his that survives. Beuys maintained his interest in leaf collages throughout his lifetime, producing many works in this vein. Another such work in the ARTIST ROOMS collection is <i>Untitled</i> 1972 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-untitled-ar00682" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00682</span></a>). As late as 1985 Beuys produced a series of ten pressed plant and pencil drawings called <i>Cotyledon Umbilicus Veneris</i> (four of which are reproduced in Temkin and Rose 1993). Beuys’s return to the botanical collage of his youth in his older age reflects the artist’s own life cycle.</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Heiner Bastian (ed.), <i>Joseph Beuys: Dibujos = Drawings</i>, exhibition catalogue, Sala des Exposiciones, Madrid 1985, p.53, plate 5, and p.177.<br/>Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose (eds.), <i>Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys</i>, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia and New York 1993.<br/>Christian Weikop, ‘Forests of Myth, Forests of Memory’ in Christian Weikop and Richard Davey (eds.), <i>Anselm Kiefer, </i>exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy, London 2014, pp.30–47.</p>
<p>Andrew W. Symons<br/>University of Edinburgh<br/>January 2015</p>
<p>
<i>The University of Edinburgh is a research partner of ARTIST ROOMS.</i>
</p>
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Summary
2017-02-17T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<p>In this collage, the artist has combined a leaf with lime, putting a mineral element together with an object from the natural world. Beuys occasionally used leaves and pressed flowers in his early works of the 1940s and 1950s, and drawings of natural forms were included in his first exhibitions after the Second World War. This reflects an interest in the natural sciences which was lifelong. In later years, Beuys referred to the 1950s as a period of preparation, which he spent reading and making hundreds of drawings which influenced his later sculpture and 'actions'.</p>

Online caption
2009-04-16T00:00:00
online-caption
ONLINE_CAPTION
abstraction education, science and learning irregular forms leaf lime miscellaneous non-representational objects plants and flowers science society