Helnwein in England
Hank Smithicks
06.Dec.2000
ART newsroom.com
Joanna Hayman-Bolt
HELNWEIN
Any artist who sites Donald Duck and Jesus Christ as the most
important influences in their art must be worth taking a look at.
In the row of pristine gallery fronts in London's Cork street, you
cannot miss Gottfried Helnwein's show; it's the one with the gigantic
Mickey Mouse staring out at you.
The Robert Sandelson Gallery has given us a stunning show of the
infamous, Austrian born artist's recent work. Helnwein is on a mission
to find the answers to questions that no-one in Austria would give
him; such as why the post-war republic portrayed itself as a victim
rather than as one of the first main perpetrators of Nazism.
It's rare to see such explicit confrontation with major social issues.
References in art to such horrors as the two world wars and the
Holocaust are usually made indirectly through symbolism or
abstraction. Despite attention given to the users of shock tactics,
the majority of contemporary artists shy away from figurative images
which directly illustrate horrific social realities, preferring
instead to use personal concerns or the heavy use of irony. This is
where Helnwein differs. His photo realist paintings are strongly
illustrative of the results (rather than the acts) of Nazi oppression
in the Second World War.
Where do Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse come into all this? Helnwein
uses the strategy, known to many film makers, of juxtaposition; take a
serious "adult" phenomenon such as death or sex and place it together
with a picture of childlike innocence and the mental disturbance to
the viewer is increased ten fold. The use of children and cartoon
characters have several functions. They are not just a filmic special
effect, although the paintings are particularly uncomfortable to look
at for this reason; they have particular relevance to the artist both
in terms of his own experiences and his concerns with some of the
muffled truths of the Second World War.
Helnwein was born in Austria; a country that had willingly embraced
Nazi Germany. For decades after it's defeat the Austrian population
had great difficulty in coming to terms with the evil association.
Helnwein felt that for this reason he had been brought up in a
dysfunctional society.
The artist wrote of this time: "My childhood was a horror. Born
right after the war, I lived in a world of deep depression and
unlimited boredom . . . I never saw anyone laughing and I never heard
anybody sing. I always felt I have (sic.) landed in limbo. A
two-dimensional world without colours. My real life began when I got
my first Mickey Mouse comic book from the Americans - when I opened a
world full of three dimensions and wonders . . ."
The Mickey Mouse that stars in Cork street ("Mickey Mouse", 1995) is
far from colourful. Painted in tones of black and white, although his
radar ears and doorknob nose is as sweetly comical as ever, his smile
is menacingly sinister. The sheer size of the famous mouse becomes
threatening and we begin to see the character through the eyes of a
terrified child in war time cinema. Helnwein explained that he began
to paint as a way of diffusing his frustration with not having his
questions about the war answered. An early picture of his was a
portrait of Adolph Hitler painted with his own blood from
self-inflicted razor cuts to the palms of his hands. Having painted
Hitler portraits throughout the 1970's he began to attract attentions.
Ironically some of it came from Neo-Nazis knocking on his door to see
the freshly painted portraits of the "Fuhrer". Another irony is the
fact that Helnwein studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna - as
indeed did Hitler.
Power is given to Helnwein's confrontations on canvas by virtue of
him being an extremely skilled painter. His photo realism is
immaculate and highly effective. Even under close scrutiny, the subtle
shades and invisible brushwork makes it hard to distinguish the
painting from a photograph. This hyper-realism is impressive not
because "it looks like a photograph" for that would cancel out the
purpose of painting. It is impressive because this controlled
application of paint is cool enough to create an air of photo
documentation without being sterile. Helnwein creates a
"photo-montage" in paint, blending his own images with genuine W.W. II
photographs. The result is subtly disturbing. The atmosphere in all
the paintings is slightly dreamlike and the characters appear in these
dramas like spectres. "Epiphany I (Adoration of the Magi)", 1996, is a
dark and brooding image of five S.S. officers gathered round a modern
day Aryan goddess as the Madonna who holds a naked baby "Jesus", his
black hair swept across his brow in the style of Hitler. The image is
huge (2 meters by 3 meters) and of a cinematic wide screen format.
It's easy to see why Helnwein has been at the centre of several small
controversies. The sacrilegious nature of the painting upset not only
the orthodox Christians but ironically those associated with the
officers depicted. Helnwein is being sued by the widow of one of the
Nazi officers depicted for the unauthorized use of the image of her
husband. A bit rich, seeing as her late husband cannot have had one of
the clearest of consciences in political history.
Helnwein exploits the image of the child in a Balthus-type manner.
Photographs of early pubescent children are used in a similar way to a
hard hitting Lewis Carroll. In another large scale painting, "Epiphany
III (Presentation at the Temple)", 1998, a young girl dressed in white
lies prone, unconscious or perhaps dead on a table while a group of
nine disfigured war veterans stand around in sombre witness. The
painting reminded one of Rembrandt's "Anatomy lesson of Professor
Tulp", 1632, and the similarities go beyond the compositional. The
image is painfully tender, the light that glows around the young girl
- apart from making her angelic - reflects the revelations of the
medical experimentations on children during the war years. The theme
of the child was spurred by an interview in an Austrian tabloid in
which the country's Head of Psychiatry, Dr. Heinrich Gross, admitted
killing children at Vienna's Am Spiegelgrund Paedriatric Unit during
the war by poisoning their food. Helnwein painted "Life Not Worth
Living" - a water colour of a little girl "asleep" with her head in
her plate; it initiated a nation-wide debate which ultimately led to a
court hearing and Gross' resignation.
Upsetting as these images are - it is the foetal heads that tower 4
meters above the viewer on entering the gallery that start the
provocative ball rolling. Helnwein makes giant portraits of these
pre-natal babies in the three canvases "Angel Sleeping I, II and III",
1999. The ghostly images (manipulated photographs) have the merest
hint of painted colour casting a blue and yellow wash over the
"angels". In this way Helnwein captures that uncanny hue that
characterizes foetuses floating in a stillborn liquid from which they
will never emerge. Unlike Damian Hirst's sharks and livestock in
formaldehyde that made the headlines just a few years earlier,
Helnwein allows us no intellectual distance. The face that is the
beginning of a human being confronts a wide range of issues; not all
of which would be wholly negative. However, in the context of this
experimentation during the war - the face reveals more tragic truths
of vile inhumanity in the 20th century.
It's easy now for an artist to shock with their creations and
visions and many seek sensation this way. But Helnwein creates
sensation for the viewer as much as he has for the Austrian and German
newspapers (a more recent controversy that hit the papers resulted in
he and his family moving to Ireland in 1997). His sensitivity comes
through a careful use of tender images and technical sophistication.
The images don't hit you, they absorb you and let you go away sharing
some of the artist's disgust at human kind. It's a brave and difficult
job to deal with such issues without being sensationalist or just an
illustrator of horror. Helnwein reaches the limits of the blood
thirsty and it would be easy to place him in the long line of German
and Austrian artists from Grunewalde to Otto Dix who were
uncompromising in their portrayal of human torture and butchery.
Indeed, Helnwein's most effective works are those which refrain from
direct illustration of physical suffering. The fact that he makes
Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck so haunting somehow makes a greater
impression than blood and bandages. In this way the artist makes a
universal statement about the importance of a child's innocence and
happiness, without which there can be little hope for the sanity of
future generations.