‘Drawing is the first visible form in my works … the first visible thing of the form of the thought, the changing point from the invisible powers to the visible thing’ – Joseph Beuys

Executed in 1956, Nordpol (North Pole) is an early drawing by Joseph Beuys. While recovering from the trauma of the Second World War – during which his plane was shot down on the Crimean Front – the artist poured his energies into drawing during the 1950s, exploring ideas and imagery that would set the tone for the rest of his practice. Pursued obsessively as an intrinsic part of his daily life, the act of drawing came to form the crucible of his output, and was later acknowledged by the artist as the fundamental catalyst for his entire oeuvre. The van der Grinten brothers, whose gallery originally handled the present work, were among the earliest patrons of Beuys’ drawings, and offered him a place to stay on their farm after he suffered an emotional and physical breakdown in 1957. This period is widely considered a key moment in his artistic development, sparking a process of deep thought, theorisation and ‘preparation’ – as he put it – that would pave the way for his involvement with the Fluxus group in the early 1960s.
The present work’s subject is one that Beuys would reference at various points throughout his oeuvre. The transition between opposing states – warmth and cold, solidity and fluidity, chaos and form – was a dynamic that would come to characterise much of his work, and was arguably embodied in the notion of earth’s magnetic poles. For an artist who drew widely upon science, shamanism, German Romanticism, anthropology and spiritual philosophies, moreover, the mysteries of the vast frozen landscape and its inhabitants offered a pertinent source of inspiration. Here, surrounded by a dark void, the forms of arctic creatures quiver in two vignettes below a bright splash of white, perhaps evocative of the North Star.