Review of Joseph Beuys – The Hideous Bathtub That Contains All the Horrors of Modern History | Art and design

forJoseph Beuys, born in 1921, was the “perfect” age to fight for Hitler and he did, with the wounds to prove it. The photographs of Andy Warhol that complement this exhibition, without actually being part of it, brutally capture his emaciated, battered face in the glare of the photo beneath the hat he wore to hide the burns he sustained in a plane crash while serving in the Luftwaffe. The most terrifying image turns Beuys into a spectral negative, all darkness and shadows, his eyes wounded, guilty, lost. It was the 1970s, when Beuys was a charismatic one-man artistic revolution, inspiring young Germans to plant trees, give lectures on environmental and human energy flows – and, in startling performances, he talked to a dead rabbit or spent a week locked in a cage with a wolf.

All that remains today of those movements, protests and performances are posters, preserved scribbles on blackboards, and enchanting videos. However, the moment Beuys disappeared – he died in 1986 – his solid, physical sculptures took over. He believed strongly in flow and flux, promoting a spiritual vision of humanity and the universe. When he stopped speaking and acting, entropy took over his art, making it a static, fallen collection of dead things. And all the greater for it.

Who wants to bathe in this? The sculpture at the heart of this exhibition, the Bathtub, is a massive metal tank with protruding pipes and valves, the inside wrinkled and mottled like human flesh, the entire bizarre structure resting on a giant mammoth tooth. The bathtub, derived from a design that Beuys modified from 1961 to almost the end of his life, is an unforgettably sinister work, immersing you not in hot water but in the black bile of modern history, its pipes connected to the fetid sewers of the worst horrors of the twentieth century.

Beuys fascinates you and sickens you at the same time. This excellent show celebrates him at his most extreme: an unabashed myth-maker, reviving ancient Germanic traditions. Who would use this epic bathtub? Brunhilde, of course. The show is called Heroine’s Bathtub, in case we missed it.

Meanwhile, his 1949 Pioneer Woman sculpture mimics the wild anatomy of the Venus of Willendorf and other Paleolithic sculptures from Germany, Austria and Central Europe. You can see why an artist searching for post-1945 German renewal could turn back the clock 30,000 years. In the Stone Age, from which the “Flower” characters who inspired Beuys came, he can imagine pre-broken national myths. His nude statuette with massive hips embodies Wagner’s cult of mythical women freed from Wagner’s sins. In dreamy watercolors such as Female Figure (1954) and Animal Woman (1949), Beuys reclaims the Rhine Maiden.

The obsession with prehistory reaches its screaming climax in his 1961 work, Mammoth Tooth, Framed, consisting of a real tooth from an extinct mammoth, ivory and grey, incised and wrinkled, supporting a small copper bathtub. It’s a model of the giant pigeon at the heart of the show. Perhaps this ancient tooth from a beast that roamed Germany before Germany existed can purify the bathroom and those who bathe in it.

However, when I walk around the bathtub, I see no escape from history. Far from being the balm of forgetfulness, it looks like a Valkyrie’s coffin, rough and ugly with memory. The terrible tubes protruding from it seem to lead to mass killing machines just as the rusty rails in his magnificent installation Tramstop lead to Auschwitz.

Boise always had one foot in the grave. Over time, his utopian hopes overshadow the incalculable truths that burden his art. This outburst of his is a reminder of the joyful but damning creativity of an artist who literally saved his country’s culture, giving it access to myths that might have been forever internally censored, laying out the tramways of today’s great German artists Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, and showing the way for any young artist who wants to discover the poetry of material things. And be careful, it is also a bath in the acid of history.