Looking back in 1974 to his very first class of students, Beuys ascribed their level of expectation to their complete trust in their teacher as a person of unquestioned authority. He was their ‘absolute patriarch’ and every word he spoke was ‘absolute dogma’ . Many of them were still fixated on the teaching methods of their former teacher and considered Beuys’s corrections and criticism as a ‘campaign of destruction’ against everything they had learned up to then. What Beuys noticed in particular about his students was their ‘superficial notion of art and sculpture’: ‘Of course they had had all the ideas about craftsmanship drilled into them..., whereby exactly these concepts of craftsmanship were quite vague.’ The absence of any critical detachment from their former teachers and from what they had been taught was reflected in their tendency towards stylistic adoption: ‘Above all they had been taught that sculpture had to be something thick’.
Although he was very much against a strictly defined curriculum, Beuys decided, from the very start, to base his teaching on draughtsmanship, the study of nature and daily life studies before a live model. Two factors influenced this decision: firstly, his experience of the teaching methods of his own teacher, Ewald Mataré, which had likewise been based on draughtsmanship, and secondly, the importance which Beuys himself attached to draughtsmanship with regard to his own work as an artist. Beuys always stressed that drawings were an important reservoir, a source of creative energy, a ‘kind of basic material’ . Consequently, the training of the students’ powers of observation, this being the most important prerequisite for sculpture, and the development of purely objective criteria – ‘the mathematical foundation’ of their work – took absolute priority. In the beginning, Beuys restricted himself to ‘telling them something about proportion and the fundamentals of sculpture, about angled perspective and rhythm’. Whilst he rejected the traditional, academic methods of teaching drawing, Beuys still considered both the learning of basic drawing skills and closeness to nature to be absolutely indispensable. As Gerda Hühn recalls, Beuys regarded ‘nature study as a scientific discipline, comparable with the study of anatomy’ . But this was as close to the academic tradition as Beuys was prepared to go, for he was not concerned with an anatomically accurate depiction of outward appearances or with a naturalistic copy based ‘merely on observation’ and intended ‘more as an imitation of a given object than anything else’ : ‘Because then it would be just like stretching a kind of stylistic skin over everything, like a costume, with nothing at all inside.’
Although drawing from plaster casts had aroused much controversy at the Düsseldorf Art Academy around that time, Beuys still considered it an essential aspect of the teaching curriculum. While Beatrix Sassen was working on a drawing of a Greek boy’s head, Beuys explained to her ‘how the lines of the brow and the chin should flow’, also stressing how important it was to show ‘how the muscles behave under the skin, what a head looks like from the inside, what function is performed by the nose’ . This step-by-step approach to nature was, according to Beuys, the basis for transcending the ‘optical and physical’ perception of the everyday world, thereby recognising its functional and structural principles and making its non-visual aspects visible. In coming to terms with a particular object, the artist should seek to achieve an abstraction of its natural being and, in so doing, to develop new ideas and variations. The physical act of drawing should be extended by the imagination, by the power of intuition. Beuys was interested primarily in finding a characteristic form of expression which would extend the visible image to include the idea behind it. Just as he would refer in his drawings or in his other works to the ‘spirituality of the material’, so he would teach his students that ‘a thing is more than its outer surface leads us to believe’ .