Documentary footage of Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys’s first meeting at an exhibition opening in Düsseldorf in 1979 is perhaps more notable for its flashing cameras and gawking bystanders than what passes between the artists themselves. Under press surveillance, the forthright Beuys makes most of the conversation. Warhol, beneath his trademark blond wig, is as awkward and retiring as ever. The art writer David Galloway described the encounter as having “the ceremonial aura of two rival popes meeting in Avignon”.
You can allow Galloway his myth-making. The two artists were epic opposites. As the gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac explains, Warhol, the exalter of consumerism, celebrity and surface glamour, “stood for America. He put a mirror to the world, showing society its excesses”. Beuys, the earnest environmentalist, spiritualist and Green party founding member, was the voice of Germany, an old world rediscovering itself in fascism’s aftermath. “He thought that art could change society,” says Ropac. It was a nail-biting collision of ideals.
