Provenance:
Collection Martin Kunz, received as a gift from the artist on the occasion of the exhibition "Spuren in Italien" in 1979.

Joseph Beuys had been working with brown colour since the mid-1950s. As Martin Kunz explains, the artist mixed many different colours to create this colouring in order to achieve the opaque, covering character of the hue, which is ‘reminiscent of earth, dried blood or iron’. Beuys placed ‘a layer of another material on the paper that does not penetrate the paper like watercolour, but covers it and sticks to it as a layer.’

Martin Kunz, in: Exhibition catalogue. Joseph Beuys: Spuren in Italien. Lucerne 1979.