Exhibition in Cologne: cathedral treasury shows early works by Joseph Beuys

The sketches are small, as if he always carried them in his shirt pocket. A slightly larger paper is crumpled and marked with measurements. The pencil lines run in a circle, fine hatching shows the Crucified with a painful but sometimes musty face. It is easy to imagine that the young employee of the cathedral workshop tried out the expression on his own face – in front of his shaving mirror, which later disappeared in the central portal of the cathedral.

Joseph Beuys followed his academy teacher Ewald Mataré from the Düsseldorf Art Academy to Cologne – when the sculptor was commissioned to design the south transept doors. The Cathedral Treasury is now dedicating an exhibition to Beuys’ early years from 1947 to 1955, which shows a lesser-known side of him.

Androgynous bust

Anyone who associates the exceptional artist and academy teacher with fat corners and felt can gain an impression of his great talent as a draftsman and sculptor. As a young man who grew up in the Catholicism of the Lower Rhine, “his art is borne by a deep, religious awareness. A basis that he would later fall back on again and again,” says Leonie Becks, Head of the Cathedral Treasury. In later works, Beuys took up the images from his early phase like quotations. The sun cross could then be seen on an ammunition box.

Becks curated the show with items on loan from the Museum Kurhaus Kleve and the Museum Schloss Moyland Foundation in Bedburg-Hau, among others. The portrait bust that Beuys made in 1947 as a self-portrait in Joseph Ensling’s class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy can also be seen. She appears androgynous, her facial features show clear edges.

With art out of the crisis

Beuys studied sculpture, the current show also describes his first years as a freelance artist. At this beginning there was soon a crisis, a depression, from which drawing finally helped him, as Becks explains. The showcases in the treasury contain designs for a baptismal font and a cross. Next to it is the receipt for mosaic stones, which were difficult to obtain in the post-war period. But the master student Matarés found a destroyed villa in Meerbusch from which he was able to get the rare stones.

Master builder Peter Füssenich describes Beuys as a “craftsman through and through”. His teacher placed great trust in him, and words of appreciation for his gifted student are repeated throughout Mataré’s diaries. As Becks explains, it was not an unencumbered relationship. Beuys later said that he himself had not designed the cathedral doors in this way.

Nevertheless, according to Becks, there are many similarities between the two personalities. This is especially true for the animal subject: Mataré is famous for its cows, Beuys made sheep sculptures. Together they created the depiction “The Burning Cologne” on the Whitsun door in 1953. The imagery is moving: while the Rhine flows in simple hatching in the lower area, the cathedral is surrounded by houses crowded like a honeycomb, from which the flames lick up into the sky. A skeleton rises at the top edge of the picture, the fire eats everything up – an inferno.

But Becks sees a replacement of Mataré, because Beuys began to abstract. In 1952, in a letter to the teacher, whom he held in high esteem, he announced that he wanted to go alone, “in pursuit of an unattainable goal.”

Mataré was open to the unorthodox ideas of his pupil, as was the case with the shaving mirror that Beuys placed in the cross on the central portal. In an interview he gave in 1980 to the then director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Wulf Herzogenrath, he explained: “I suddenly felt the need for something that shed light.”

The mirror later disappeared during renovation work. In the exhibition in 1980, in which contemporary artists showed their view of Cologne Cathedral, the now world-famous artist complained that his addition to the bishop’s door was missing. The sentence was emblazoned on a reproduction: “My shaving mirror is missing.”

Until June 24, daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Roncalliplatz 2.

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