In a captivating exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in London, the late German artist Joseph Beuys’ most iconic and unsettling work takes centre stage. “Bathtub for a Heroine” is a powerful exploration of the artist’s tortured relationship with Germany’s past, a testament to his enduring legacy.
Born in 1921, Beuys was the “perfect” age to fight for the Nazis, and the scars of his wartime experiences are evident in the haunting portraits that complement this exhibition. The Andy Warhol pieces capture Beuys’ gaunt, ravaged face, his eyes wounded and guilty, a spectre of the past. Yet, Beuys would go on to become a charismatic artistic revolutionary, inspiring young Germans to plant trees and lecturing about the flows of ecological and human energy.
The centrepiece of the exhibition, the massive “Bathtub,” is a steampunk metal tank with protruding pipes and valves, its interior rumpled and mottled like human flesh. Cast from a design Beuys tinkered with from 1961 until the end of his life, the sculpture is a sinister, unforgettable work, immersing the viewer not in hot water but in the black bile of modern history, its pipes connected to the fetid sewers of the 20th century’s worst horrors.
Beuys’ obsession with prehistory reaches a crescendo in his 1961 work “Mammoth Tooth, Framed,” featuring a real tooth from an extinct mammoth, ivory and grey, supporting a small copper bathtub. Perhaps this ancient relic can purify the bath and whoever bathes in it, but as one walks around the “Bathtub,” there is no escape from history. Far from a balm of forgetting, the work looks like a coffin for a Valkyrie, jagged and ugly with memory.
Beuys always had one foot in the grave, and as time goes by, his utopian hopes are eclipsed by the immeasurable truths that weigh down his art. This exhibition is a reminder of the joyous yet cursed creativity of an artist who literally saved his country’s culture, giving it access to myths that might have been forever internally censored. It is also a bath in history’s acid, a haunting tribute to a man who left an indelible mark on the art world.