He spent the late afternoon smearing fifty grams of warm liquid honey over his scalp, pressing fifty sheets of beaten gold leaf into the amber stickiness until his head became a gleaming, metallic mask. His left foot slipped into a thick felt overshoe; his right foot received a heavy slab of iron bound tight to his boot with leather thongs. Then he picked up the limp, chilled body of a dead hare, stepped inside the white gallery room, and instructed his dealer to lock the front door from the inside.
Outside on the rain-swept cobblestones of Hunsrückenstraße in Düsseldorf, Germany, a fashionable crowd of art critics, collectors, and journalists stood shivering in the dark. It was the evening of November 26, 1965, the opening night of Joseph Beuys's first solo commercial gallery exhibition at Galerie Schmela. Instead of serving wine and congratulating the artist, dealer Alfred Schmela kept the entrance bolted shut, forcing the crowd to press their faces against the cold plate-glass window to watch the performance unfold: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt). Much like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain a half-century earlier, the evening defied every polite expectation of what a gallery exhibition was supposed to be.
For anyone standing on that sidewalk, the central question was immediate and confounding: why did Joseph Beuys explain pictures to a dead hare instead of talking to the influential buyers standing five feet away in the rain? The answer reveals one of the most radical critiques of academic logic in modern art history.
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare in 1965
For three unbroken hours, Beuys never once glanced through the glass at the shivering spectators. He cradled the hare against his chest like an infant, whispering quiet syllables into its long ears as he moved between thirty-eight ink and pencil drawings displayed on the walls.
He walked the perimeter of the room with the measured cadence of an off-duty priest; stepping carefully over the dry needles of a fallen fir tree, pausing before each ink drawing on the wall, lifting the stiff gray forepaws of the hare to brush the surface of the paper, and whispering continuous, secret explanations into ears that could no longer twitch.
Every step produced an unsettling acoustic cadence that echoed through the narrow room. First came the sharp, ringing metallic clank of his iron sole striking the floor, followed immediately by the muffled, soft silence of the felt shoe. It was a rhythmic pulse (clank, thud, clank, thud) that cut through the glass to the crowd outside.
Twenty-five-year-old German photographer Ute Klophaus was the sole chronicler permitted inside the room. Her high-contrast black-and-white photographs captured Beuys under the raw gallery bulbs, his gold-coated face catching stark highlights while honey occasionally trickled into his eyelashes.
Beneath a plain wooden stool near the entrance, Beuys had stashed a single animal bone wound tightly with copper electrical wire. He never explained what the wire was broadcasting or receiving. He simply sat on the stool periodically, resting the hare across his thighs, staring ahead in complete stillness.
The Clash Between Logic and Animal Instinct
To an outside observer, the action looked like ritual madness. Postwar West Germany in 1965 was defined by its rapid economic reconstruction, a society intensely focused on industrial efficiency, practical commerce, and orderly respectability. Art critics attended gallery openings expecting clever visual puzzles they could dissect with formal vocabulary and publish in the morning paper.
Beuys believed that very rationalism was paralyzing human culture. To his mind, educated audiences had become trapped in an intellectual cul-de-sac: treating art as an academic riddle to decode with clever words rather than an experience to feel directly in the gut.
By locking the critics on the pavement and whispering only to an animal corpse, Beuys staged a blunt confrontation with intellectual pretension. He argued that a wild hare understood the raw, material reality of existence far better than a critic armed with art history textbooks.
Unlike tame rabbits that burrow into subterranean tunnels, wild hares live directly on the open surface of the ground. They scrape shallow depressions in the grass to sleep, run across open hillsides, and remain exposed to the elements. For Beuys, much like for traditional painters and lovers of animals wall art, the hare was an ancient symbol of incarnation: an animal rooted entirely in physical earth and instinct.
Felt, Iron, and Gold: The Physics of Intuition
Nothing in the room was arbitrary. The materials were chosen like components in an electrical circuit.
The iron plate strapped to his right boot served as a hard conductor, grounding his body to the cold stone floor and transmitting shockwaves of sound with every step. The felt sole on his left foot did the exact opposite: felt acts as an insulator, absorbing sound, retaining body heat, and shielding against cold.
Liquid honey represented living warmth and nourishment, the collective product of thousands of bees working in biological harmony. Gold represented the alchemical conductor of solar energy and spiritual transformation. By spreading them across his head, Beuys turned his own skull into a living battery of thought.
If you look at the trajectory from early avant-garde experiments like Dada art to raw expressionist wall art, you find artists constantly pushing against rigid academic boundaries to reawaken basic human instinct. Beuys took that impulse to its absolute outer limit: he removed human conversation from the room entirely.
When the Gallery Doors Finally Opened
At roughly ten o'clock, after three hours of solitary pacing, dealer Alfred Schmela turned the brass key and opened the front doors. The frozen crowd pushed inside from the dark street, expecting an artist talk, an explanation, or at least a glass of wine to take the chill off the evening.
They found Beuys seated on the wooden stool near the threshold. His back was turned completely to the doorway. Cradling the dead hare in his lap, his face still caked in dried honey and gold foil, he sat in absolute silence, refusing to turn around or acknowledge a single visitor.
When writers later questioned why he chose to address a lifeless animal instead of talking to the collectors who had come to support his career, Beuys left them with a remark that still cuts through art-world pretension six decades later: "Even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality. The problem lies in the word understanding and its many levels, which cannot be restricted to rational analysis."
