Joseph Beuys (State I) is an original screen print by Andy Warhol from 1980. Joseph Beuys continually expanded his definition of art by staging “happenings” and “actions” that were never intended to last. Best known is his performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, in which the artist, whose head was inexplicably covered in honey and gold leaf, literally carried a dead hare around with him as he traversed a gallery space that was partially inaccessible to the public.

In a way, Joseph Beuys was trying to achieve the opposite of Andy Warhol. With his bizarre performances and cryptic artworks, he attempted to create new mythologies and break away from the materialism that Warhol freely toyed with. This tension between the artistic approaches of the two artists offers an interesting perspective on the representations of Beuys and Warhol.

Joseph Beuys FS II.242 itself is quite unambiguous. Four stagings of a high-contrast and heavily shaded photograph (fairly typical of Warhol’s photography of the time) lie on a soft cyan gradient. In the photograph, Beuys is wearing his iconic fishing vest and fedora. His gaze is captivating as the borders of the sclera of his eyes merge with the rest of his face, leaving behind piercing pupils. His expression is neutral, suggesting either indifference or deep thought. His gaunt and Teutonic features make him appear almost alien, perhaps appropriate for an artist whose work is situated on the edges of intelligibility. At the same time, Andy Warhol makes Beuys a Warhol, paying him due reverence, as he does to his other works, which are considered shrines to celebrity, but also anchoring him in the material world. In Joseph Beuys State I (FS II. 242), Warhol makes Beuys tangible, almost approachable.

Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys met for the first time in Düsseldorf in May 1979. Around seven months later, they met again in New York, which led to a “click” (Beuys) between the two artists. Warhol took almost a hundred Polaroid photographs of Beuys and chose one of them as the basis for a total of nineteen screen prints, which he presented a year later at the Schellmann & Klüser gallery in Munich. The artists traveled to Munich especially for this almost historic event and gave interviews before their “co-production” – an event that embodied the fascinating interplay of real and supposed contrasts between the two personalities and offered both amusement and profundity. The star staged himself, while the shaman revealed himself. It was well known that Beuys explored every object in detail as the energy carrier of his story, while Warhol cultivated the surface in depth. One could experience how precisely Beuys conveyed his entire artistic concept, while Warhol skillfully talked past the questions posed.

Warhol, whose fame seemed to be fading as people thought they had seen through his “American” scheme, portrayed Beuys, who was currently in vogue due to his exhibition in America. Warhol depicted the image of the European artist using his tried and tested screen printing technique, which had already proved its worth for his “American” subjects, from soup cans to the Mona Lisa. In contrast to his portraits from the seventies, however, he completely dispensed with “make-up” and did not emphasize lips, eyes or decorative elements, nor did he use areas of colour. This resulted in Beuys portraits in black on white, black on black, black on red and red on green. He enriched Warhol’s spartan mode of expression with an effect that oscillates between kitsch and subtle aesthetics. He experimented with diamond dust, which he added to the paint so that the pictures “shine, really glitter” (Warhol). Is this an arbitrary, image-enhancing effect, because “Beuys really is a shining apparition that just shines”, or does Warhol see the technical means as an expression of dignity?

The peculiarity of Warhol’s work is based, as Beuys put it, on the impossibility of clear categorization: “Even when Warhol speaks a lot, he erases the content of his information through thousands of contradictions that he builds up. Even when he speaks, he remains silent.” Beuys recognized in Warhol’s art, which uses advertising techniques, the erasure of the original information content: “In this way he brings destruction, Americanism, to the absolute zero point at which every tradition ends.” Despite this apt analysis, Warhol maintained that these pictures would be suitable as advertising: “I also think that the pictures make a great advertising poster. And since I think Joseph should really stick to his politics, these pictures would make a good poster.” Although this sounds like a constructive statement, the exchange between the artists and the portrait shows that both recognized exactly how they are reflected in the mirror of the other: The contrasts are both resolved and reinforced, and their own respective images are promoted.