Extract from catalogue: HUNDERTWASSER - Artist and eco-activist

HUNDERTWASSER

CONTENTS

9 PREFACE

Christian Gether 13 HUNDERTWASSER

Joram Harel 15 HUNDERTWASSER THE PHENOMENON

Andrea Rygg Karberg and Camilla Jalving 43 ROLLING ON THE FLOOR: HUNDERTWASSER AS AN ARCHITECT

Martin Zerlang 59 HUNDERTWASSER ON ARCHITECTURE

Friedensreich Hundertwasser 63 WHOEVER INVENTED THE SHIP ALSO INVENTED THE SHIPWRECK FOS 88 HUNDERTWASSER: BIOGRAPHY (A SELECTION)

Camilla Jalving 94 LIST OF EXHIBITED WORKS

Opposite page: 937 Close-Up of Infinity – Tagore’s Sun, 1994. The Hundertwasser Non-Profit Foundation, Vienna (31)

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Preface

“I want to show how basically simple it is to have paradise on earth,” the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) wrote when he was staying in Venice in 1975. It is hard to imagine a more paradisiacal place on earth than what is shown on the cover of this catalogue. We see Hundertwasser busy at work, on the island of Giudecca with a view of St Mark’s Square across the water. Still, the statement neatly encapsulates Hundertwasser’s project. His vision was to use his art to make the world a better place. He materialises paradise in brightly coloured paintings, fantastical buildings and in a unique brand of eco-activism embracing everything from humus toilet manifestos and tree-planting actions to plant-based root-zone treatment systems. This was the paradise he wanted his audience to reach for by appealing to people’s imagination and dreams and by making art that holds great aesthetic beauty as well as surprise and testifies to a rare level of commitment.

For Hundertwasser, art practice and life practice were two sides of the same coin.

Whether he was making sprawling, ornamental paintings; devising organic, undulating buildings; letting plants grow wild on the rooftops, inside houses and out windows; spearheading the “Plant-a-Tree” movement, living organically or making his own clothes, it was above all about living a utopia. It was about realising an idea of a better world, where people live in harmony with nature.

At ARKEN, we have long been investigating the concept of utopia and its relevance to us today. Utopia was the title of a big exhibition project at the museum over a three-year period from 2009-2011 that examined utopia through works by three contemporary artists. This interest in utopia and the “utopian impulse” underlies ARKEN’s fascination with Hundertwasser.

Hundertwasser’s legacy has been through a rough patch in some ways. While his unique images found their way into many Danish homes in the 1970s, he has to some extent been excluded from the history books, despite his relevance to both architectural and art history. Recently, a string of international exhibitions have corrected this distortion of Hundertwasser’s legacy. Art historically, then, it is important to show Hundertwasser. But even more important is looking at how Hundertwasser speaks to us today. What is the impact of his art in the here and now? In what ways does encountering his practice, visions and ideas make us smarter? How can he inspire us today?

There is no doubt that Hundertwasser, in his ideas about green architecture, ecology and “urban gardening,” is more current than ever.

But his utopian vision, his faith in the power of art, is also very relevant today. In a time of utopian deficiency, Hundertwasser makes for a surprising and inspiring acquaintance, who hits us right where we live. (...)

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Opposite page: 981 Homage to Van Gogh, 1998. The Hundertwasser Non-Profit Foundation, Vienna (35)

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Hundertwasser the Phenomenon Andrea Rygg Karberg and Camilla Jalving

It is a long time since my “artistic activity” has no longer been limited to the word “art,” just as the word “art” is no longer adequate for everything being created now and only leads to misunderstandings. What is being done now is no longer “art” in the old sense … I am in the midst of an adventure whose enormity justifies my existence and my “artistic activity,” but it is very difficult for me to say anything about it.

For example, at the moment I cannot draw a line separating art, religion, life, science, nature, politics, literature, mysticism and music.1 Writing from Paris to an art critic in his native city of Vienna in 1954, Friedensreich Hundertwasser charted the artistic course he would take over the next decades. In the process, the line between his art and his life slowly dissolved, making them one. Art, clothes, home, lifestyle, self-representation, even the name Hundertwasser, were elements in the totality of Hundertwasser the phenomenon. A selfmade artist, he stood out in his world and thus, paradoxically, pointed ahead to ours.

Hundertwasser is best known for his pictures of colourful spirals, meandering lines and mask-like faces. They found a place in many Danish homes in the 1970s as fine-art prints and reproductions, popping up on cookie tins, t-shirts and all sorts of souvenirs from Vienna.

But Hundertwasser was also so much more.

Above all, he was an uncompromising artist driven by a utopian vision who fought for ecology and sustainability a long time before

it became fashionable. In a time of upheaval, when the grand narratives were being shot down, he believed that he could make the beauty of nature visible to everyone through his painting, architecture and manifestos and, in turn, make the world a better place.

1) From “Hundertwasser, A Letter from Paris”, 1954. Quoted in Wieland Schmied, Hundertwasser 1928-2000, catalogue raisonné, vol. I, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 94

It has been said about Hundertwasser that he dressed like someone who wanted to be seen.

The truth is that the clothes he designed, the art he made and the life he led cannot be separated. An artist of fabulous visual intelligence, his distinct opinions and philosophy shined through in everything he did. Hundertwasser was not the kind of artist who goes to his studio to work like it is just another day at the office. In fact, he did not even keep a studio but just painted wherever he happened to be – in Vienna, Venice or rural Normandy.

He did not use an easel and often painted on available materials. For long periods, his boat Regentag was the base of his nomadic life.

After his early years in Paris in the 1950s, he travelled to Japan and Uganda, among other places, and from the late 1970s on he made New Zealand his home. He is buried there today under a tulip tree.

Hundertwasser was a Romantic with a capital R. His painting is shaped by Viennese artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and his architecture testifies to a deep longing for a time before Functionalism and its rational thinking. While he points back, he also points ahead, straight into our own time (...)

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Opposite page: Hundertwasser with the painting 466 First Spiral painted in Japan, Tokyo, 1961. Photo: Keisuke Kojima

ROLLING ON THE FLOOR Hundertwasser as an Architect Martin Zerlang

Arriving in Vienna from the north, the first landmark you see is not the spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral but an over 100 metre high, minaret-like tower topped with a giant onion dome and enmeshed in glowing optical fibres. Like a monument of the dreams of 1001 nights, it welcomes your arrival.

But the minaret is not a minaret. It is a chimney. And the vibrant building, carried by an array of gaudy columns, adorned with ceramic ornaments, featuring garden terraces and a small rooftop forest, is not just an architectural fantasy. It is the Müllverbrennungsanlage Spittelau, a waste-to-energy incineration plant.

While an incineration plant might well make you think of Hell, it made the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser think of Paradise. For the author of a manifesto entitled The Sacred Shit, celebrating waste management in a visionary and ecological manner was a dream assignment.

Dreams of Paradise There is probably no dream as old as the dream of Paradise and probably no longing as strong as the longing to get back to it. In Paradise, the individual merges with the whole.

Everything goes into everything. All distance is eliminated, including the distance inherent in clothes. The inhabitant of Paradise is the “naked human being.”

the naked human being. He or she could be seen at festivals, on stage, on the canvas, on screen. In 1967, he could be seen at Galerie Hartmann, Munich, when the painter Friedrich Stowasser, now known as Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser, removed his clothes, “his second skin,” while discussing the human right to a “third skin,” architecture.

Mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, Hundertwasser transformed himself into an architect of sorts.

Aided by trained architects, notably Peter Pelikan, his colourful, playfully shaped buildings went up in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the US, Japan and New Zealand. Public housing projects, a day-care centre, a train station, a church, a public toilet, a heating plant, a winery and, of course, a Hundertwasserhaus. All anticipated in and accompanied by a string of manifestos on architecture as part of nature.

Architecture implies walls, and walls put up barriers. In the ultimate dream of Paradise, all walls must fall and all architecture must fall away. Georges Bataille, a leading Surrealist, was outright against architecture, while Salvador Dalí, more agreeably, said that he dreamed of an architecture that was soft and hairy. A lifetime later, in 1969, the Danish poet Inger Christensen, in her collection of poetry it, called for “a city as soft as a body.” But how?

Towards the Soft City 151 Bleeding Houses, Hundertwasser titled

The dream of Paradise caught new fire in the 1960s, and a token of that dream was

an early painting from 1952. Seven high-rises cover the picture plane from top to bottom Read more in the printed catalogue

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Opposite page: District Heating Plant Spittelau, Vienna, 19881992. Photo: Fernwärme Wien

The 30 Days Fax Painting, 1994. The Hundertwasser Non-Profit Foundation, Vienna (30)

936

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The Small Way, 1991.

The Hundertwasser NonProfit Foundation, Vienna (29)

931

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Hats That Wear You, 1982. The Hundertwasser Non-Profit Foundation, Vienna (24)

844

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Hundertwasser Biography (A Selection) Camilla Jalving

1928 Born 15 December, Vienna, as Friedrich Stowasser. His father dies the following year and Friedrich grows up with his mother as a single child.

1942-43 Friedrich joins the Hitler Youth to protect his Jewish mother and her family. During 1943, 69 members of his mother’s family are deported and die. Only Friedrich and his mother remain.

This year Friedrich starts drawing and painting seriously.

1948 Graduates from school and spends three months at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Gives a speech at the Leopoldskron Castle in Salzburg, titled Everyone Must Be Creative.

1949-50 Starts the travelling that would characterize his life. This year he travels around Italy, where he meets René Brô. He winds up in Paris, where he takes the name Hundertwasser.

The following year, he enrols at the Parisian art school École des Beaux-Arts but drops out on the very first day.

1951 Spends the winter and spring in Tunisia and Morocco. Becomes a member of the Art Club, Vienna, where he has his first one-man show the following year. Starts making his own clothes and shoes, what he calls “Creative Clothing.”

Opposite page: Hundertwasser’s early performative action Tokyo Stroll, 1961.

Photo: Keisuke Kojima

1953 Paints his first spiral painting and returns to Paris. It is there the following year that he starts writing several texts of aesthetic theory and begins to number his works.

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1956 Sails as a deckhand on the SS Bauta from Söderhamm, Sweden, to Hull, England.

1957 Acquires La Picaudière, a small country house in Normandy. Publishes several texts of aesthetic theory.

1958 Marries Herta Leithner in Gibraltar, but they divorce two years later. Gives his first reading of the Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture at the Sekau monastery in Austria.

1959 Receives an honorary prize at the São Paulo Biennial. With fellow artists Ernst Fuchs and Arnulf Rainer, he founds the alternative art academy Pintorarium. As a visiting instructor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, he carries out the painting action The Hamburg Line together with Bazon Brock and Herbert Schuldt.

1960 Stages The Nettle Campaign in Paris.

1961 Visits Japan, meets his future wife Yuko Ikewada (divorced in 1966). In Japan he translates his first name into the Japanese characters ‘peace’ (Friede) and ‘realm’ (Reich), from 1961 onward naming himself Friedereich and later Friedensreich. Receives the Japanese Mainichi Prize and has a succesful exhibition at Tokyo Gallery.

1962 Stays in Venice, on the island of Giudecca, which becomes one of his regular bases. First retrospective at the Venice Biennale.

Painter, eco-activist, architecture doctor, globetrotter – the artist Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser is a fascinating acquaintance, a firebrand whose heart beat for nature and human liberation. In actions, manifestos, paintings and fantastical buildings he sought to make the world a better place. His work mingles brightly coloured spirals, golden domes and wildly growing trees with such down-to-earth things as humus toilets, nettle soup and homemade clothes. He was controversial in his time.

Today, his concepts of green architecture, ecology and urban gardening are more current than ever.

Buy the catalogue at ARKEN or order it at: reception@arken.dk

With contributions by Joram Harel Andrea Rygg Karberg Camilla Jalving Martin Zerlang Friedensreich Hundertwasser FOS