Now Viewing | Joseph Beuys - The Moment Blog - NYTimes.com

Like a West German Andy Warhol, the influential postwar artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was a man who understood art’s intrinsic ability to self-mythologize. Jack Hanley Gallery’s current exhibition, “Joseph Beuys: Plakate: Signed Posters 1969-87,” features 33 signed posters that span the most prolific phase of Beuys’s career, serving as both an outlaw retrospective and a window-shopper’s delight. The show offers a variety of jumping-off points for Beuys devotees to puzzle out the infinite complexities of his work, and several posters earmark his controversial travels to America. Seen collectively, they act as mini-records of Beuys’s art-world infamy; one commemorates his 1974 action in front of Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where the gangster John Dillinger was killed by a gunshot. Tributing John Milius’s 1973 film “Dillinger” with a quick-and-dirty conceptual remake, Beuys’s poster allows the artist’s obligatory mythmaking to displace the actor Warren Oates and crib the film’s original tag line: “He was the gangster’s gangster.” Even when flattened and hung on a wall, Beuys’s charismatic agenda continues to outfox, seduce and refocus the art of his storytelling.

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