A Hundertwasser Retrospective

A Hundertwasser RetrospectiveAuthor(s): Brenda RichardsonSource: Art Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Autumn, 1970), pp. 48-50Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775343 .

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A Hundertwasser

Retrospective

Brenda Richardson

During his visit to Berkeley in 1968 Fried- rich Hundertwasser complained that all old ladies ask what his paintings "mean," and all students ask technical details about the media he employs. He was not only bored with the questions, but he was also unable to an- swer, since he says that his paintings do not mean anything and he claims to be com- pletely ignorant of the various art media and methods. In this sense Hundertwasser may be considered as one of the true "primitives" and, further, as a painter whose work cannot be better understood enhanced by the established structures of art criticism. His paintings stand apart from contemporary modes of artistic expression and cannot cogently be discussed in the common vocabulary of our standard art values. His work is admired, often passionately, by thousands of viewers, and for once the philistine's comment, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like," seems an appropriate comment on a Hundertwasser painting. People, including critics, seem to respond viscerally. Sophisti- cated criticism or interpretation, at least at first glance, appears to be irrelevant.

Hundertwasser was born Friedrich Stowasser in Vienna in 1928, and for twenty years lived a life probably not unlike that of hundreds of thousands of other young European men and women. Yet there are certain aspects of his childhood which without question had an unusually strong impact on his personality development, and hence are relevant to his paintings. Hundertwasser's mother is Jewish and his father, who died when the child was less than a year old, was Christian. This dual religious background, placed in the context of the Second World War, still gives Hun- dertwasser emotional difficulty and this is reflected in many of the paintings. From 1941 to 1944 he was a member of the Hitler Youth Corps-not particularly unusual in Austria at the time, in fact somewhat like joining the Boy Scouts in America, if it were not for the fact that in 1943 virtually all of his mother's Jewish family (sixty-nine out of a total of

BRENDA RICHARDSON is Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley where she was co-organizer with (Herschel Chipp) of the Hundertwasser exhibition last fall, and also co-author of the book-catalogue accom- panying the exhibition (143 pp., many color plates, New York Graphic). The exhibition was also seen in Santa Barbara, Houston, Chicago, New York and Washington. l

seventy-four) had been deported and exter- minated. Though Hundertwasser had been baptized a Christian in his father's faith, he and his mother nevertheless went into hiding in Vienna early in 1944 and through the du- ration of German and later Russian occupation and throughout all the fighting in Vi- enna, they lived in the cellar of their house on the Danube Canal. He still relates the rhythms of his favorite music, that of Mo- rocco and Tunisia, to the strongly patterned beat of machine gun fire that he remembers from this time.

1. II Cardazzeuropeo, 1955, Galleria del Naviglio, Milan.

During this war-time period, he did some casual sketching, an interest which had been encouraged through his early enrollment at Vienna's Montessori school, which he at- tended in 1936, at age eight. As in all the Montessori schools, there was an emphasis on individual freedom and independent self-development. Children were taught through materials rather than abstractions, and through the senses rather than the intellect. Discipline per se was unknown, and much of

the child's development was based on allow- ing endless repetitions of known exercises. One of Montessori's primary revelations was that the liberty to carry out particular repetitions answers still undefined psychological needs. Also seemingly relevant is the Montes- sori emphasis on individual ego-pride. Per- haps a still more basic interest of the artist originated at the Montessori school. In a very few cities-Vienna being one-Montessori de- cided to experiment with the architectural environment of her schools. Building, furniture, materials, etc., were scaled to children rather than to adults. Today Hundertwasser's interest in architecture is so intense that he devotes as much, if not more, time and energy to en- vironmental criticism than he does to his own painting. His interest is of course purely emotional, with neither a scientific nor a practical foundation. His basic thesis is that modern architecture is created without consideration for the occupants or their individuals needs.

The Montessori school not only gave this child the undisciplined freedom to express his artistic impulses, but it was also a school especially directed at the "exceptional child" (the first Montessori school was established in 1907 for the "deprived" or "retarded" child, and the schools in their ultimate development were noted for handling students with either unusual problems or skills). Predict- ably, Hundertwasser's school reports noted " . . above average sense of color and form ..." (as, I presume, did the school reports of many other students).

In 1943 he first began to draw with some seriousness and persistence of interest, por- traying architectural monuments and land- scapes, and using the simplest media (pencil, crayon, or water colors). Because of the war and subsequent military occupation he was not able to complete his secondary studies until 1947, and in 1948 he enrolled at Vien- na's Academy of Art. After three months he left, apparently irritated with the rigidly clas- sical discipline of the Academy. This ended his formal educational and artistic training (except for one-half day at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1950-a school which he departed for similar reasons). This lack of formal training in the specific media and methods of painting has resulted in disaster from the museum man's point of view: for the most part, even recent paintings are in dubious, if not extremely poor physical condition and require extensive care and often restoration if they are to be preserved for any significant period of time.

The bad condition of his paintings reflects an interesting conflict on the part of the artist. After leaving Vienna's Academy in 1948, he never again really settled down in one place. He is a compulsive wanderer and his work is therefore most frequently done under what would technically be called "adverse conditions." At least ninety percent of his work is painted on paper-but not necessarily

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prepared paper; he generally uses whatever

paper is at hand, which may be wrapping paper or posters or paper bags, usually creased, torn, folded, or otherwise damaged. He then

paints the paper, also with anything at hand.

Descriptions of his media are bewilderingly complex, including watercolor, egg, oil, enamel, charcoal, polyvinyl, gold and bronze dust, silver and aluminum foil, "ground Afri- can earth," etc. He says that when he has technical questions about media he consults Max Doerner's book, Malmaterial, a source with obvious limitations if Hundertwasser's

paintings are any measure. Yet there remain the vivid colors, the

charm, the naivete, and the intensity of the

paintings themselves. The motifs have been standardized since 1953, when he first used the spiral in his paintings, and include, be- sides the inevitable spiral, houses and win- dows, faces and eyes, trees, boats, fences, and rain- or tear-drops. The artist has frequently spoken about his use of the spiral; he says it

represents for him birth, motion, beginnings and endings, and sometimes just a form con-

veniently available when no other comes to mind. His claim to have "invented" the spiral is obviously as absurd as if Mondrian had claimed invention of the square. Much too much has already been said about his spiral, when in fact all that need be said is that his use of this device proved remarkably success- ful and apparently personally satisfying and hence has been perpetuated.

It is even less useful to attempt to deter- mine the "formal sources" of Hundertwasser's

non-style. When questioned, he will deny virtually any influence, as will most young artists (young not necessarily defined in terms of years). To be as uninformed of the modern art world as Hundertwasser feigns to be, he would have to have lived as a recluse. On the

contrary, he has traveled widely and almost

continuously since 1948 and has spent consid- erable periods of time in major art capitals- Paris, Munich, Venice, Vienna, Tokyo. He claims as his true mentor the little-known French artist Rene Bro, with whom he traveled through Italy to see the famous Ravenna mosaics and Sienese frescoes. Back in France, he and Br6 collaborated on two large frescoes, and the two artists remain extremely close friends. When asked which American artists he admired, he said "only Simon Rodia and

Joseph Pickett" (The work of the American

primitive, Pickett actually bears an extraordi-

nary resemblance to Hundertwasser's, though Pickett's paintings are more specifically repre- sentational). Hundertwasser also admits to

admiring the work of Walter Kampmann (a minor German expressionist painter) and that of Jean Dubuffet, and of course the architectural constructions of Antoni Gaudi.

Because he was born in Vienna, critics have considered him to be heir to Klimt and Schiele, and part of the "Magic Realist" or

2. Yellow Houses, 1966, Mrs. Elsa Stowasser, Vienna. Black and white illustrations abysmally misrepresent Hundert- wasser' gay and naive color compositions. The large houses are canary yellow with green window frames. The tall house (church?) at right is red, the background blue.

3. Sun and Moon (The Aztecs), 1966, Joachim Jean Aberbach, New York. The faces are deep orange with green shirals and red eyelids. The rays are gold (sun) and silver (moon).

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5. Rainday from the Rainday. 1968, Galerie Kruger et Cie, Geneva.

"Viennese Fantastic" schools. Hundertwasser likes the work of Klimt, Schiele, Fuchs, etc., but so do many others, whether in Vienna or elsewhere. Hundertwasser says he likes the "color squares" of Klimt-but also those of Paul Klee. He occasionally uses the scrubbed surfaces and "earth" tones characteristic of Schiele-but these are equally characteristic of Dubuffet's "art brut." Some of his early (1950) nude and portrait sketches have been

compared to Schiele drawings, but they are

basically incomparable: Schiele was a brilliant draftsman and Hundertwasser is not. As far as the paintings are concerned, in strictly formal terms Schiele was twice the painter Hun- dertwasser will ever be, and Klimt's "color

squares" seem slim evidence as a primary source when the work of the two painters has

literally nothing else in common. The ab- stracted full-moon faces so common in Hun- dertwasser's paintings could have come from Klee, Dubuffet, or even Redon-but he says they come from the paintings of Br6, whose wife Micheline "looks just like this."

It is really pointless to attempt to identify the sources of Hundertwasser's painting. He

paints what he is and what he has seen-and in an age of mobility and mass communica- tions media, that covers a lot of ground. Like

many other artists Hundertwasser is an eclec-

tic-perhaps to his discredit, he more than most. True he grew up in Vienna, enveloped in a rich decorative environment. By his own admission, his favorite art form is a sort of

collage/mosaic/conglomerate (Ravenna, Ro- dia, Gaudi), and he did spend twenty years in the midst of Viennese architecture and Art Nouveau design, where mosaic "mural" walls are not at all an uncommon sort of decoration. What no one seems to mention is that he also spent even more formative years (in the sense that by this time he had chosen his

metier) in Paris in the early fifties. If critics

must fit Hundertwasser into a "school," they should not neglect the most obvious relation-

ship to Delaunay and the Orphists, and perhaps the even stronger kinship to the Cobra

group of painters? Birth in Vienna does not make a Viennese painter out of Hundertwas- ser through some fatalistic necessity.

In truth, a Hundertwasser retrospective at this time is premature, for the paintings are no yet uniquely his own: they are Karel Ap- pel, Ren6 Bro, child art, Delaunay, Dubuffet,

Feininger, Gaudi, Walter Kampmann, Klee, Klimt, North African and Oriental ethnic, Joseph Pickett, the Ravenna mosaicists, Si- mon Rodia, Schiele, Saul Steinberg, the Wiener Werkstatte-ad infinitem. At Hundertwasser's

age and stage of development (having painted only since 1950), it would be extraordinary only if this were not so. It is also not sur-

prising that Hundertwasser himself fails to see all these elements in his work-his innate innocence and freedom of expression have been sorely tested by the dealers and collect- ors pounding at his door.

Ironically, the most recent painting in the exhibition, Rainday from the Rainday, done in May 1968, shows the first signs of a new

development. Paintings in the ranged exhibition at Berkeley from 1950 through 1968, and there is minimal sytlistic differentiation between individual pictures over this eigh- teen-year period of time. Yet Rainday and a few even more recent paintings reveal definite

changes: a new, more realistic perspective; a

technically improved handling of the media; a simplification of imagery; a breaking away from the limitations of planar decoration; and a self-control which might possibly lead Hundertwasser out of the mire of narcissistic hedonism and into the business of painting.

In other words, Hundertwasser is a "primitive" who has been led astray by his own ego and by the "star system" inherent to the con-

temporary art sccene. As an unequalled and

relatively youthful success (critically and fin-

ancially) in Europe and Japan, admirers line his path with adoration and appeals to buy paintings at ever increasing prices. He cannot in fact paint fast enough to meet the demand and, at that, he sells only to people he likes. Now, after his first American exhibition, he seems almost schizophrenically torn between the child and the prima donna in himself. Like both, he delights in approval and is stricken by criticism. Charmingly thrilled by his own exhibition, he appeared every day at the museum in Berkeley to see how many people came, to speak with students, to look at his own paintings (some of which he had not seen for fifteen years).

It is not possible to analyze with any truth- fulness Hundertwasser's paintings. He paints compulsively and, despite the fragility of his work, he is obsessed with his paintings as if

they were his children. More accurately, how- ever, the paintings are less his children than

they are his own self-his history, his psyche, his environment, his supposedly nonexistent "influences." The sensuality immediately evi- dent in these paintings becomes a vaguely troublesome intensity after prolonged view-

ing, just as Hundertwasser's own sensuality masks a disturbed and impelling personality. Emotion-charged, if only subliminally, Hun- dertwasser's work elicits similarly emotional

responses from viewers: they are entranced by the brilliance, sincerity, and charm which seem to radiate from these paintings. Hun- dertwasser's work simultaneously animates and tranquilizes, evoking individualized asso- ciative responses from each viewer. And in turn, through every person who looks at his

paintings Hundertwasser, quietly lonely and eccentric, renews his touch with humanity.

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4. Zwolle, 1967, Siegfried and Gesche Poppe, Hamburg.



Documents

A Hundertwasser Retrospective