For Joseph Beuys all creative thought was art and everybody potentially an artist. As a boy he ran away with the circus, at 19 he joined the Luftwaffe, and the disturbing events of these early years remained influential throughout his career. Paul Allen reassesses his profound impact on 20th-century art as an exhibition of Beuys's later work, the famous multiples or "editions", opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Plus the making of a modern subculture: Howard P Chudahoff 's historical study of The Age of the Bachelor is reviewed.
Producer Tony O'Shaughnessy