Untitled (Beuys)

1972–1985

The project “In Defence of Nature” in Bolognano

From 1972 to 1985 Beuys carried out in Bolognano the project “Operation In Defence of Nature”, the Italian project with the greatest international impact: artistic, political, ecological and humanitarian actions, among them the “Paradise Plantation” of 7,000 plants (1982) and “Olivestone” (1984).

24 June 1977 – 2 October 1977

Exhibition: Documenta 6

late 1970s

Among the founders of the German Green Party

The Free International University became one of the four organisations that founded the German Green Party at the end of the 1970s; Beuys himself was a founding member and lifelong supporter of the party.

1978

The manifesto of “social sculpture”

Riding the wave of left-wing opposition, Beuys published a manifesto on “social sculpture” expressing the anarcho-utopian principle of “direct democracy”, meant to replace bureaucratic mechanisms with the sum of free creative acts of individual citizens and groups.

1978

The court rules the dismissal unlawful; Beuys does not return

A federal court ruled Beuys's dismissal from the academy unlawful, but he no longer accepted the professorship, wishing to be as independent of the state as possible.

1979

The retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum

In 1979 the only major retrospective of Beuys's work organised in his lifetime opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; it has been described as a “lightning rod for American criticism”, provoking powerful and polemical responses.