In 1943, Joseph Beuys’s plane crashed in the desert, an experience that led him to dedicate his life to art after World War II. He graduated from the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1951, becoming the school’s professor of monumental sculpture a decade later. In the 1960s he associated with Fluxus artists including Nam June Paik, participated in Documenta 3 in Kassel, and founded the German Student Party. In between representing Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1980, a retrospective of his work was held at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979. For Documenta 7, in 1982, Beuys planted the first of 7,000 oak trees around Kassel. He remains one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.
