The first years from 1961 until the end of the Sixties

Beuys’s first two years of teaching at the Academy were a period of extremely concentrated work because of the small number of students attending his class. The decision to study under Joseph Beuys was still a very fortuitous one, for Beuys was hardly known, neither as an artist nor as a teacher at the Academy. From the very beginning, Beuys would spend up to ten hours a day at the Academy. He even taught during the vacations. It was then, said Beuys, that his work with his students was at its most fruitful, for only the ‘keenest students’ would come along. Like his own teacher, Expressionist sculptor Ewald Mataré (1887-1965), Beuys placed great importance on absolute punctuality and regular attendance. He was extremely offended if any student failed to turn up in his class and would even go so far as to phone the student’s parents. By the end of the Sixties, on the other hand, full attendance at any one time had become impossible owing to the large number of students enrolled in Beuys’s class.
In 1961, Beuys took over the students of Professor Mages. Beuys’s criticism of their work and his unusual teaching methods disconcerted them to such an extent that all of them, with the exception of Hede Bühl, left his class. Even though Beuys’s teaching must have been influenced by the experience of his own traditionally oriented studies under Josef Enseling (1886-1957) and Ewald Mataré, his individual style of teaching was already making itself felt, for it differed considerably from the traditional notion of academic study.
Until then, the curriculum had been strictly defined and allowed the student no individual scope whatsoever. Beuys’s first students had been accustomed to such didactic teaching methods, obeying strict rules and executing precisely formulated assignments. Beuys, on the other hand, expected his students to work on their own, motivated by their own enthusiasm. He based his teaching not on a clearly formulated theory or programme but rather on a concept which he developed on the spot, in interactive dialogue with his students. As he did not give his students any specific assignments and, unlike his predecessor Professor Mages, criticised their work with brutal frankness, Hede Bühl and the others soon felt that everything they had learnt up to then was being called into question. The very openness of Beuys’s approach to art was hard to take, especially as he refused to provide his students with the kind of framework they had been accustomed to and within which they would have been able to develop their own artistic styles. Consequently, most of them were at a complete loss: ‘And so there we were,’ Tadeusz recalls, ‘sitting in the classroom, none of us having the slightest idea about what we should do, not even Beuys.’
Some of the other students, on the other hand – like Bernd Lohaus – viewed the freedom which Beuys had given them in an altogether positive light, recognising it as an opportunity for individual development: ‘From the very start, he set different standards, defined new values and made other things possible; we were taught to call ourselves into question: be aware if you are angry, do whatever you think is necessary. He gave us students a different kind of freedom.’