The special exhibition In/Tuition: A Seminar's Engagement with Joseph Beuys will be on display at the Busch-Reisinger Museum until Dec. 7. The exhibition is a result of a seminar on Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) offered last spring in Harvard's Fine Arts Department and led by the exhibition organizer, Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator, Busch-Reisinger Museum.

The works in the exhibition were drawn from a virtually complete set of the artist's multiples (editioned objects and prints) recently acquired by the Busch-Reisinger as part of the Willy and Charlotte Reber collection. Over the two decades before his death, Beuys produced some 600 multiples, which reflect, reference, or revisit most of the artist's manifold activities, procedures, and concerns in some way.

Thirty-seven works have been selected for the exhibition, which concentrates on the perception and experience of the exhibited object, its problematic status as a work of art presented in a museum, and on the process of coming to terms with the interrelations of grouped pieces. Thus In/Tuition is not intended as a survey of Beuys' extensive and multifarious career, but is conceived as one part of the Busch-Reisinger's long-term engagement with the artist's work.

Beuys was one of this century's most intense, inventive, and indefatigable artists. Through his varied, challenging, and often controversial activity as a draftsman, sculptor, artist, political activist, and ecological campaigner, Beuys became the leading German, if not European, artist of the postwar period. After service in the German air force as a radio-operator, dive-bomber pilot, and paratrooper during World War II, Beuys studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, producing not only various religious sculptures but also a very large number of drawings exploring natural, mythological, and figurative themes. Following a personal crisis in the mid-1950s, Beuys resumed drawing, and also immersed himself in scientific, political, and literary writings. With his appointment to the Academy as professor in 1961, Beuys was able to broaden the public forum for his developing ideas about an "expanded role for art" and "social sculpture," in which art was seen as creative activity in all spheres of life.

During the 1960s, Beuys became widely known for his enigmatic, almost hermetic actions and performances which deployed, as did his drawings and sculptures, lowly but evocative materials such as honey, fat, and felt. The 1970s saw an increasing politicization of his work, as he confronted the German educational, parliamentary, and economic systems. He founded a number of radical organizations, such as the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research. He also became deeply involved in the nascent environmental movement.

In/Tuition was developed by four pairs of students who were assigned one of Beuys' multiples, around which they were to choose eight or nine additional objects, related in some way by theme, form, concept, or material. The multiples, works of art published in editions, incorporate a vast range of techniques in printmaking, drawing, and sculpture, as well as the innovative use of ready-made objects and unconventional materials (such as fat, felt, gelatin, audio tape).

The four thematic sections address in different ways viewer response to the work, exploring the notion that Beuys' key aim is the stimulation of that kind of thinking which can sense, search out, and live through the connections, transformations, and metamorphoses which may link the many manifestations of the artist's creativity. "A mind liberated to the task, set in motion by the experience of trying to combine and reconcile two or more aspects of Beuys' work," says Peter Nisbet, "is a mind exercising its individual creative freedom."