Detail

This small gouache, “Man with Gold Legs,” by Joseph Beuys is a piece from what is known as the Cologne portfolio, which is named after an anonymous Cologne collector and includes 64 graphic works drawn by Beuys between 1945 and 1973. These are drawings, watercolors, collages, and oil paintings of different sizes, on newspaper, packing paper, card, and cardboard. “Man with Gold Legs” was painted on the back of a delivery note. The man’s ascetic, nearly geometrical body seems to be adapted to the lines of the form shining through from the back, and to be forcing itself into their normative space. The sheets in the Cologne portfolio together exemplify the whole of Joseph Beuys’s work in drawings. All the themes that mattered to Beuys and shaped his thinking are present. A former director of our museum, Dieter Ronte, summarized this collection as follows: “The Cologne portfolio is a par excellence display of Beuys’s early interest in the morphology of natural phenomena, in organic-anatomical forms in fauna and flora. A central theme is the vulnerable, maltreated, ready to die, tangible, and sentient human being. The Cologne portfolio speaks of archaic hunters and gatherers, of voodoo ideology, fragile figurines, fireplaces and sacrificial feasts, burial grounds, campsites and caves, primitive wagons and primeval sledges. […] complex phenomena are evoked, conjuring up mythical worlds; the world of the past and the present are connected by symbols and associated with monstrous experiences—of faiths and means of movement, of generators, machine parts, tools, chemical formulae, verbal and other messages. These messages are crosses, states of being, descriptions of faith, annotated states of excitement, which then take shape in the form of the drawing, terse and tense, flexible and fixed."