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Joseph Beuys

By David Look

Sunday November 23, 2008

Joseph Beuys: On 16 March 1944 Beuys’s Ju 87 plane crashed on the Crimean Front. The pilot was killed but Beuys was found by a German search commando and brought to a military hospital where he stayed from March 17 to April 7.[2] This incident, and Beuys’s subsequent embellishment of it, is perhaps the most controversial aspect of his artistic persona. Beuys later recounted how he had been rescued from the crash by Tartar tribesmen, who had wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health.