Gustav Metzger

The artist’s biography as told by Metzger himself, a leader of the Auto-Destructive Art and Art Strike movements.

A visionary artist and radical thinker, Gustav Metzger asked provocative questions about the role of the artist and of conventional forms of artmaking and display. In this richly illustrated book, Metzger tells the story of his life and work in a series of interviews with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. He recounts his Orthodox Jewish childhood in 1930s Nuremberg and his arrival in England as part of the Kindertransport before shedding light on his development as an artist, including his early contributions to computer art, his leading role in the Destruction in Art Symposium of 1966, and his call for an ‘art strike’ from 1977–80.

An artist for our times, Metzger’s uncompromising commitment to combating environmental destruction was fundamental to his understanding of art as a vehicle for change. This publication speaks emphatically to the undimmed urgency of Metzger’s artistic position, offering an insight into his interests in ecology and nature and, in the later part of his life, the threat of extinction and the motto he adapted from W. H. Auden: ‘We must become idealists or die.’