At the beginning of the 1950s, nearly all artists of the informal groups sought liberation from the dogmas of representational panel painting. The turn to Art Informel or abstraction unleashed an explosion of creative energies, prompting the evolution of other styles which greatly enriched the postwar art spectrum in the Federal Republic of Germany. These include color field painting, painting through the concrete, dispassionate medium of color as illustrated by the focus of the work of Georg Karl Pfahler (born in 1926), Gunter Fruhtrunk (1923-1982) and Lothar Quinte (born in 1923). They also include the environment-related action art of HA Schult (born in 1939) and movements such as the “happening” initiated by Wolf Vostell (born in 1932) and the Fluxus activities profoundly influenced by him.

Both of the latter are events in which the audience plays an important role, especially in the case of the happening. Fluxus is more theater, performance, self-presentation of the artist-actors. Here Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) set standards that dwarfed everything else. Even his early drawings dating from the 1940s as well as his objects, sculptures and “actions” reveal that he lived out an unorthodox concept of art which opened up new dimensions and meanings to art. His frequently misunderstood formulas “Art is life, life is art” and “Everyone is an artist”, his “actions” with fat and felt, his ideas rooted in the anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the rigorousness with which he attracted an ever larger following of students at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, the resultant radicality marking his conflict with the government of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia - these are but a few striking aspects of the life of Joseph Beuys. With his “extended concept of art” he created an instrument that enabled him to propagate “social sculpture” as the consummation of his philosophy of art.