Joseph Beuys review The bathtub containing all the horrors of modern history
By Jonathan Jones
[...] The sculpture at the heart of this exhibition, Bathtub, is a massive steampunk metal tank with protruding pipes and valves, the inside rumpled and mottled like human flesh, the entire grotesque structure resting on a giant mammoth tooth. Cast from a design Beuys tinkered with from 1961 to near the end of his life, Bathtub is a sinister, unforgettable work, immersing you not in hot water but in the black bile of modern history, its pipes connected to the fetid sewer of the 20th century’s worst horrors.
Beuys enchants and sickens you simultaneously. This excellent show celebrates him at his most Wagnerian: an unabashed mythmaker, reviving ancient Germanic lore. For who would use such an epic bathtub? Brunhilde of course. The exhibition is called Bathtub for a Heroine, in case we miss that.
Meanwhile, his 1949 sculpture Lead Woman imitates the wild anatomies of the Venus of Willendorf and other Palaeolithic sculptures from Germany, Austria and central Europe. You can see why an artist searching for German renewal after 1945 might turn the clock back 30,000 years. In the stone age, from which the “Venus” figures that inspired Beuys come, he can imagine a prelapsarian national mythology. His little nude sculpture with its massive hips embodies a Wagnerian cult of mythic women that’s been freed from Wagner’s sins. In dreamy watercolours like Female Figure (1954) and Animal Woman (1949), Beuys redeems the Rhinemaidens.
The obsession with prehistory reaches a screaming climax in his 1961 work Mammoth Tooth, Framed, consisting of a real tooth from an extinct mammoth, ivory and grey, ridged and furrowed, supporting a small copper bathtub. It’s a maquette for the giant bath at the heart of the show. Perhaps this ancient tooth from a beast that roamed Germany before Germany existed can purify the bath and whoever bathes in it.
