Beuys would repeat this account time after time. The problem with this great romantic tale -- a mythic story of a modern man falling from the sky and healed by primitives through ancient, earthy means -- is that subsequent investigations suggest it's too good to be true, that he was in fact found by a German search party within a day of the crash and immediately hospitalized. Was his tall tale a self-aggrandizing con or a desperate parable invented by a man who had come home broken from war to find his cause was a monstrous lie?
More than 160 of Beuys's works on view at Providence College, Brown University, and Rhode Island School of Design this month raise such questions again, 20 years after his death on Jan. 23, 1986. Beuys's works are rarely seen in any numbers in the United States. He achieved fame in the 1960s as the first major German artist after the war -- one who, through both art and politics (he was a founder of Germany's Green Party), attempted to come to terms with his own and his nation's catastrophic Nazi past.
The exhibits present Beuys's multiples -- editions of sculptures and prints specially commissioned by the artist -- which he used to spread his message. As he described it, our technological and commercial ways had failed us, and he would heal these wounds via ancient, shamanistic practices. He sought to create ''social sculpture" to provoke fresh thinking and inspire others to apply their creativity toward a ''direct democracy" that could cure the world's ills.
