On 9 January 1974, Joseph Beuys arrived in the United States for the first time with Klaus Staeck and Gerhard Steidl. Their itinerary—New York, Chicago and Minneapolis—was conceived not as a conventional visit but as a performance unfolding across aircraft, taxis, hotels, universities and galleries. *Joseph Beuys: Beuys in America* gathers the extensive photographic documentation of that tour, placing public appearances, improvised actions and ordinary intervals within a single sustained work.

At New York’s New School, Beuys explained his model of social sculpture for hours while covering three large blackboards with drawings. Chicago brought contentious lectures and a spontaneous reenactment of gangster John Dillinger’s death outside the Biograph Theatre; Minneapolis added press conferences, discussions and extended walks through a department store. Seen in sequence, these episodes show how Beuys treated speech, movement, encounter and circumstance as artistic materials. America appears not merely as a setting but as a field in which his ideas were tested before audiences and against local histories.

Hundreds of photographs and many hours of videotape were assembled after the group returned to Germany, yet the project remained unfinished for more than a decade. Beuys finalized the book’s sequence only in October 1985, shortly before his death, and the first publication followed in 1987. That chronology gives the volume a particular authority: its order is not a retrospective arrangement imposed by later editors, but the outcome of Beuys’s own prolonged consideration of how the tour should be remembered.

Published by Steidl in 2022, this 224-page hardcover is a wholly reconceived edition prepared by Staeck and Steidl. Its importance for collectors rests less on isolated images than on the relationship between action, documentation and editorial sequence. It preserves a collaboration among artist, witnesses and publisher while showing how a transient performance became a durable book—an instructive example of photography functioning simultaneously as record, raw material and extension of an artwork.