Joseph Beuys review – a show steeped in fat, felt and fiction

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London
The German artist may have lied about being shot down in a stuka in world war two – but he took his mythology seriously

He always wore a hat. Like everything else he touched, it became a totem drenched in personal meaning, the symbolic headgear of a self-appointed shaman. In reality, according to those who knew him, the hat covered scars from a Stuka crash, in which rear gunner Beuys was seriously wounded, on the eastern front in 1944.

That much is true. Probably. Yet the story Beuys later made up about his wartime experience has been discredited since his death in 1986 by people who bothered to check the Third Reich documents. Beuys claimed he was rescued, barely alive, from the burning Stuka by Tatar nomads and swathed in fat and felt to resurrect him. It was a tale that explained not just his survival but his rebirth as a radical visionary out of the ashes of his youth in the Nazi era. The trouble was, it was a lie. Does that matter? Is it still a useful fable, part of his crazy vision, or should we suspect that his entire artistic output is similarly dishonest, or even that it is tainted by a past he never truly rejected or explained?

Related: Fat, felt and a fall to Earth: the making and myths of Joseph Beuys

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