| Born Friedrich Stowasser in 1928, the late Friedensreich Hundertwasser became the best-known Austrian contemporary artist by the end of the 20th century. The independent art museum KunsHausWien in Vienna’s third district has housed the museum of Hundertwasser’s work since its opening in 1991. Its flanking rooms alternate with exhibitions of international stature, perhaps gesturing that Austria’s rightful place on the contemporary art scene is by virtue of the artist’s work. |
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KunstHausWien: Hundertwasser’s Museum – Floss Gaely
Born Friedrich Stowasser in 1928, the late Friedensreich Hundertwasser became the best-known Austrian contemporary artist by the end of the 20th century.
The independent art museum KunsHausWien in Vienna’s third district has housed the museum of Hundertwasser’s work since its opening in 1991. Its flanking rooms alternate with exhibitions of international stature, perhaps gesturing that Austria’s rightful place on the contemporary art scene is by virtue of the artist’s work.
Stealing the spotlight at the museum, Hundertwasser’s oeuvre is recognized as important and impressive for two main reasons: his incorporation of Egon Schiele’s artistic style and the artist’s own artistic talent and environmental influences. It is the combination of both these aspects that makes the artist’s pieces striking, and often controversial.
In describing his creative power and its insurgence, the late Hundertwasser says, “I was the first one at school who was able to draw perspective properly and the first one who stopped doing so because I didn't want to draw that way any longer.” Common themes in his work are a rejection of the straight line, bright colors and organic forms. The artist makes efforts to reconcile humans with their natural environments and also simply attempts to be original in his work. Considered original he was: sui generis, in a league of his own.
On display at the KunstHausWien are paintings by Hundertwasser that reflect the main reaches of his creative interest: architecture, painting, graphic work, ecology and the spiral form. As the art museum tells us, Hundertwasser was concerned with architecture since the early 50s, and for the rest of his life, he pursued an interest in constructing buildings that balanced humans with nature.
He began his involvement in architecture with manifestos, essays and demonstrations, which were later followed by architectural models that he used to illustrate his ideas of creating forests on rooftops, developing inhabitable tree-houses, houses built in the shape of eye-slits, high-rise meadow houses and spiral houses.
It was this aspect of Hundertwasser’s imagination that made him stand out as an Austrian contemporary artist in his own right. His beliefs about how to create his art led to his comparison with the enigmatic and forward-thinking Gustav Klimt: Schiele’s mentor, and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau movement.
Hundertwasser famously believed the spiral was a special artistic form that “lies at that very point where inanimate matter is transformed into life.” He incorporated the spiral into many aspects of his work, saying, “I am convinced that the act of creation took place in the form of a spiral. Our whole life proceeds in spirals. Our earth describes a spiral course. We move in circles, but we never come back to the same point. The circle is not closed. We pass the same neighborhood many times; it is characteristic of a spiral in that it seems to be a circle, but is not closed.
In his work, Blutende Häuser (Bleeding Houses), we see his hitherto held strong beliefs transpose themselves onto canvas. Hundertwasser said about them:
“When you juxtapose complementary colours (red-green, blue-orange, violet-yellow), they start to shimmer and bleed. I often sit for a long time in front of one of my pictures at twilight and watch the blue slowly get lighter and lighter, the yellow and red slowly darker, so that the whole picture turns into its opposite. It is like watching a sunset and witnessing how day becomes night. When blue becomes white and red black, I turn on the light, thus turning the colours back around again. I play this shimmer game often, which only works, however, when the colours are pure and primary, and are painted on limited surfaces. Not with mixed colours and laser technique, colour shadings and contour-less wiping techniques commonly used with oils and watercolours.”
Hundertwasser is known to have painted wherever he was: at home, on the road, in cafés and restaurants, on the train or on airplanes, in hotels or at the homes of friends and acquaintances he was visiting. He had no studio and did not paint at an easel, but instead spread the canvas or sheet of paper flat in front of him. He either took his paintings on trips or left them at his places of residence and continued to paint them as soon as he returned.
Hundertwasser made many of his paints himself. He painted with watercolors, in oil and with egg tempera, with shiny lacquers and with ground earth. He used various paints in one painting and put them next to each other, so that they contrasted not only in their colors but also in their textures. The “chassis” for his paintings he usually made himself, and he almost always stretched his own canvas. He experimented with many techniques and invented new ones. He painted on different types of paper, favoring used wrapping paper, which he often mounted onto various supports, such as wood fibreboards, hemp or linen. He painted on found materials, for example, pieces of plywood that he fitted together.
It goes without saying that Hundertwasser believed the single, creative power upon which man is dependent was nature and saw mankind as a dangerous pest that devastates the earth. The artist demanded through his work that man put himself back behind his own ecological barriers, so that the earth can regenerate itself. “Paradise is here, only we are destroying it. I want to show how simple it is to have paradise on earth!”
At a time when the green movement was only first coming into being, Hundertwasser went to work on the preservation of natural surroundings and promoted a life that could be lived in harmony with the laws of nature. When the Hainburg water meadows were in danger of being destroyed by the state-planned Danube power station in 1984, Hundertwasser was one of its most vehement opponents and played an important role in the “occupation of the water meadows,” leading eventually to the failure of those government plans.
Hundertwasser’s creative power was likely something he had expressed before his paintbrush touched the canvas. His art took form in his creative ideas, a concept that usually finds itself working the other way around. His genius rested in his concept of the spiral, architecture and his visions of colour, rightfully claiming him as an artist sui generis.
Perhaps Hundertwasser was representative of Austria as a country in some way. Hundertwasser carried his influence from the icon Schiele, yet the art he created worked in a form that was applied and admired for its sense of futurity. In this way, the combination of a backward kneeling force, coupled with his forward-looking creations, could have had the notion of “what it means to be Austrian” lying at the heart of it: a country caught between the pull of a traditional Eastern history, yet one that to this day continues moving towards modernity with Westernizing intent.
