Sir

As a geneticist-turned-artist, I enjoyed Martin Kemp's Science in Culture article on the German artist Joseph Beuys, “The Pied Piper of Düsseldorf” (Nature 434, 141; 2005). However, I believe that Beuys' relationship with the sciences goes even deeper than portrayed here.

Beuys was always a great lover of animals and plants, and not just as a youth. His expertise in herbs and spices made him a great chef. During the war years, Beuys was close to a superior officer, Heinz Sielmann, also a naturalist. Although Beuys gave up ideas of medical training quite early on, he continued to develop his knowledge of natural history through Sielmann. It is through him that Beuys met Konrad Lorenz, who had established a comparative-ethology department at the Max Planck Institute of Buldern, Westphalia, in 1950.

These contacts gave Beuys a profound respect for nature, both biological and physical. This may be seen in two distinct aspects of his work. One aspect involved a series of specially chosen animals — the hare, the swan, the bee, the stag, the coyote — which existed for Beuys as metaphors for a kind of biological organization that seemed to him to offer a real source of reflection for mankind (as in Honey Pump in the Workplace, 1977). Many of the drawings in The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland (1936–76) make reference to these animals, which belong, according to Beuys, to both mythology and natural science.

The other aspect of Beuys' sculptural work invoked the phenomena of heat and electricity. Beuys did not use these phenomena in a strictly scientific sense, but he went beyond a purely sculptural use of these materials. Thus copper, felt, grease (which could itself melt during an installation) all contribute to the ‘experience’ of the exhibited art-object. Beuys' idea of potential electric energy, for example, is revealed in the series Fond VII/2 (1967–84) through piles of cut and layered felt that rise 80 cm to 150 cm above the ground, linked by frail copper wiring that gives the visitor a sense of what stored (potential) energy might ‘look like’.

My own work on a web-based sci-art project called “invisible” (http://www.invisible-cities.com) leads me to believe that one cannot easily divide Western culture into art on the one hand and science on the other.

Rather than seeing Beuys' contribution as part of a long history of utopian visions, I personally believe that Beuys developed a language through plastic form which, although not wholly reducible to natural science, was not wholly reducible to art either. As such, Beuys is to be congratulated.