In 1985, Bernd Klüser, founder of Galerie Bernd Klüser in Munich, initiated a project to commemorate the sixty-fifth birthday of Joseph Beuys. Intended to demonstrate Beuys’s profound influence on contemporary art, the project consisted of a portfolio of works by international artists, accompanied by exhibitions at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Galerie Bernd Klüser. Jörg Schellmann, founder of Schellmann Art and Schellmann Editions, joined the project as co-publisher. Beuys himself had planned to participate, but his death in 1986 temporarily interrupted the project.
With the approval of his widow, Eva Beuys, the project was eventually completed as a portfolio featuring works by thirty artists. Participants included Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Christo, Imi Knoebel, Nam June Paik, Jannis Kounellis, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino, Robert Longo, A.R. Penck, Richard Long, Shusaku Arakawa, Tony Cragg, and others. Each artist contributed a work employing distinct materials and techniques.
The portfolio serves as a remarkable record of the international art scene of the mid-1980s, encompassing major artistic tendencies of the period, including Pop Art, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Arte Povera, photography, graffiti art, Transavanguardia, New Painting, and Land Art. A portion of the proceeds from each portfolio was designated for the future establishment of a Beuys archive. Bernd Klüser described the project as the first large-scale international print portfolio since Homage à Picasso (1975), bringing together an extraordinary range of leading contemporary artists in a single publication.