Earlier this year a property in Oberkassel, an upscale neighbourhood in Düsseldorf, appeared on the market. The brokers of the property, a high-end estate agent called Engel & Völkers, made much of it as the former home and studio of the artist Joseph Beuys. ‘The creativity and genius of Beuys can be felt in every room,’ said the agency’s managing director Birgit Pfeiffer. And the timing couldn’t have been better: the artist ‘would be celebrating his one hundredth birthday in 2021 and we are particularly pleased to be brokering his home and studio on this special anniversary’.
The property, where Beuys lived between 1961 and his death in 1986, is still listed on the agent’s website: price available on request. Both the city of Düsseldorf and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia passed up the opportunity to buy it – although not out of any dearth of respect for Beuys. Pandemic restrictions notwithstanding, there are some 19 exhibitions planned to commemorate the cen