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Joseph Beuys gab Ende der fünfziger Jahre, nach einer Schaffenskrise, die er im nachhinein als "Feldarbeit" bezeichnete, die leuchtende Farbigkeit und Transparenz seiner frühen Aquarelle auf. Grau und Braun bedecken nun als zähe Paste die darunter liegenden leuchtenderen Farbschichten, die aber dennoch latent spürbar bleiben.
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At the end of the fifties, following a working crisis which he later termed “field work,” Joseph Beuys relinquished the brilliant color and transparency of his early watercolors. A thick paste of grey and brown now covered the underlying layers of brighter color, which nonetheless remained latently visible. In its haptic materiality, the opaque grey layer weighs heavily upon the delicate colorful ground, which nonetheless shines through in a nearly imperceptible way. Similar to black, grey swallows light, under whose influence alone color can unfold. In the viewer’s imagination, grey also creates, as Beuys stressed, a complementary image that implies the idea of the entire chromatic spectrum. In a process of inner imagination, the external world of experience becomes compensated: “Grey,” according to Beuys, “can be read as a neutralization or as an image of neutralization in the area of color. I use grey to provoke something in people, something like an opposing image, or one could nearly say: to produce the rainbow in people.” Beuys’ original motif and key material – grey felt – is suspended above the chasm of the grey everyday life of the late years of the German economic miracle. Grey always appears uniform in the masses, yet when we take a closer, more discerning look, it acquires a clearly individual character; in the final analysis, as Beuys said, an elephant “always wears the same suit.”
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