Scotland celebrates Beuys with £600,000 buy

The life of Joseph Beuys, one of the world's most celebrated modern artists, is to be honoured by the National Galleries of Scotland after the organisation bought more than 230 of his works.

Beuys, a former Luftwaffe pilot whose near-death experiences during the Second World War turned him to art as a form of self-healing, has been credited with pioneering the avant garde movement in post-war European art.

His use of bodily fluids, dead animals, fat, felt, earth, honey and a wide variety of human detritus paved the way for work by the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

Beuys is regarded as a leading light in the contemporary art movement, having promoted the idea that everyone is an artist and that art should touch every aspect of life. Although Beuys, who died in 1986, made several visits to Scotland, there has never been an exhibition featuring a substantial number of his works in a Scottish public collection.

The National Galleries, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and National Arts Collection Fund, have secured a deal with the German collector Jorg Schellman to buy 234 works including pictures and records of his performance art for more than £600,000.

The works, which are limited edition copies in keeping with Beuys' belief that art belongs to the masses, are to go on tour in Scotland.

"We have recognised for a long time that one of the largest gaps in our collection was Joseph Beuys," said Richard Calvocoressi, director of the National Gallery of Modern Art. "Beuys' impact on contemporary art in Scotland goes back at least 30 years and it is only fitting that he is at last properly represented in our national collection.

"He had an enormous influence on the course of modern art in the last 40 years. This is the most important addition to our post-war collection for almost two decades."

* The Courtauld Galleries have tripled their collection of 20th-century art with the acquisition of 100 works by artists including Kandinsky, Degas and Moore.

Although the Courtauld's collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings is without parallel, modern art has traditionally been its weakness.

"The importance of these news works is that they give us some chronological continuity at last. They help us to chart critical changes and developments," said Dr Enrst Vegelin, the Courtauld's chief curator. "Visitors can see for themselves how what Cezanne was doing in the 1870s and 1880s relates to Cubism and beyond."

Kandinsky apart, the best of the paintings are by the Fauves, a group of artists working in Paris whose name translates as "wild beasts", painted during the first decade of the 20th century.