A major new Artist Rooms exhibition devoted to the drawings of the German artist Joseph Beuys is a highlight of the summer programme at the National Galleries of Scotland this year. The exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art brings together, for the first time, the extraordinary group of over 110 drawings by Beuys held in the Artist Rooms collection. Put together with great care and knowledge over many years by Anthony d’Offay, the drawings cover the whole of the artist’s career from 1945 to the end of his life, reflecting his encyclopaedic interest in nature, science, philosophy, mythology, society, politics and religion. This is the largest and most important collection outside Germany by this key figure of post-war art.

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is perhaps best known for his ‘Actions’, installations and sculpture, but first and foremost he was an artist who was interested in ideas: ideas about how the world, both natural and social, functioned and how the latter could be improved. Beuys expressed these ideas most readily in his drawings. For him drawing was a form of thinking or, as he put it, ‘thinking is form’. He produced thousands of drawings, capturing some of his ideas fleetingly, as they were born and developed, but also refining others in carefully considered and composed detail. Together they constitute a crucial insight into how he saw the world.