Joseph Beuys,

1980–83

Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys met for the first time in 1979, at a crowded art opening in Düsseldorf, Germany. The two men were already well established as among the most influential, widely recognized, and successful artists of their respective countries. While their works are stylistically distinct—Bueys is known for performances and for sculptures made of heavy wool, animal fat, and chalkboards—both artists were clever craftsmen of their own images, developing personal mythologies and self-representations that became part of their artistic practices. Just moments after shaking hands, Warhol asked to photograph his fellow artist, snapping the single Polaroid that would become the basis for a series of variations on this portrait. Warhol’s celebrity portraits of the late 1970s tend to be multicolored, but in depicting Beuys he created a monochrome, applying rayon flocking to render his image as if in Bueys’s own signature material of felt.