Alfred Hrdlicka; The Times obituary (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
December 24, 2009
Alfred Hrdlicka: artist
Alfred Hrdlicka was one of the most prominent postwar
Austrian artists, although there was not much competition
for that title. He continued to carve large blocks of hard
stone long after every other serious sculptor had changed to
other materials.
"The point of stone sculpture," he once said, "is to
transform lifeless material into flesh. In no other artistic
medium is the raw material changed so directly into art."
As a painter and graphic artist he carried on the
longstanding figurative, politically inspired Expressionist
tradition after everyone else had turned either to
abstraction or - a Viennese peculiarity - Magic Realism.
Hrdlicka's opposition to abstraction and the intellectual
pretentions of artists such as Josef Beuys was largely the
result of his political convictions. For him, art that was
not totally engaged with the human condition was merely
decorative. It could not be taken seriously. He was not
simply an anti-Fascist, anti-capitalist and communist, he
was, as he once announced, "the last Stalinist". However, he
was, as so often, drunk at the time and always had a need to
provoke and irritate.
Hrdlicka was born in Vienna in 1928, ten years before the
Anschluss, which incorporated Austria into the German Reich.
In spite of the general rejoicing then, there was some
resistance and it was concentrated in Rotes Wien (Red
Vienna), the working-class districts and social housing
projects of the city. Hrdlicka's father was a trade union
activist and communist, whom he often helped to distribute
political propaganda. Under Nazi rule the father spent time
in prison as a political prisoner and as a forced labourer
with the Todt Organisation. Hrdlicka's older brother was
killed fighting on the Russian front, while Hrdlicka himself
managed to go underground and avoid conscription. A friend,
who hid him at his home, arranged for him to be apprenticed
as a dental technician. In 1945 Hrdlicka joined the
Communist Party together with countless other Viennese
artists and intellectuals, including his friend Georg
Eisler, the painter and son of the composer Hans Eisler.
Hrdlicka remained an informal member of the party until the
end of his life, although he did claim to have lost his
party card during the Hungarian uprising.
As soon as he could Hrdlicka abandoned the making of
dentures and crowns, itself a form of sculpture, and
enrolled as a student of painting at the Vienna Academy of
Fine Arts, studying under one of the survivors of the golden
age of early Viennese modernism, Albert Paris Gutersloh.
Then he shifted to sculpture and the studio of Fritz
Wotruba. Success came quickly thereafter. Hrdlicka was soon
exhibiting widely and in 1964 he represented Austria at the
Venice Biennale. The sculptures he produced during the late
1950s and 1960s were huge, heavy and roughly hewn. They
conveyed great emotion and much suffering, though the many
versions of the flayed Marsyas symbolised the
anti-authoritarian stance that Hrdlicka himself adopted.
Not all of his successes were artistic. In 1953 he played
chess for his country at an international student tournament
in Brussels. Before long he was also teaching, in Vienna,
Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Berlin. Most of the art schools that
gave him work sang his praises as an inspirational teacher,
though in 1989 he was fired from the Berlin Academy for
failing to do anything much in exchange for his generous
professor's salary.
In view of his conviction that art had to be public and
political, it was appropriate that Hrdlicka became best
known for his public sculptures, especially those in Vienna,
all of which caused controversy when unveiled. One, made in
cast iron, shows a prostrate male figure covered with barbed
wire. Another, on the square near the Albertina, has at its
centre a figure of a Jew scrubbing the pavement on his
knees. One of his last works, exhibited last year at the
gallery of St Stephen's cathedral, is called Religion, Flesh
and Power. It shows Jesus and the Apostles fondling and
groping each other at the Last Supper. This, understandably,
provoked outrage in Catholic Vienna and the sculpture was
removed from the exhibition.
Some of Hrdlicka's provocations were quite amusing. When the
former Nazi Kurt Waldheim was elected Austrian President,
mostly, according to Hrdlicka, by voters who supposed that
life under Hitler "consisted mostly of mountaineering and
skiing", the Austrian Chancellor also entered the fray.
Since Waldheim had been a member of the SA mounted division,
the Chancellor joked that "Kurt Waldheim wasn't with the SA
but his horse was." Hrdlicka then erected a metre-high
wooden horse in front of the President's official residence.
Hrdlicka cultivated the appearance and speech of a peasant
or proletarian, using the thickest Viennese dialect, even
though he could speak High German and was an elegant writer
of German prose. He was thick-set, too, with the dark looks
of an Italian and an ability to charm women. His first wife,
Barbara, a German from Stuttgart, was found to have
schizophrenia in the late 1960s, after which he became
increasingly interested in mental illness and the art of the
mentally disturbed. After her death he took a younger lover,
one of many, who caused a sensation when she tried to kill
him and herself by poisoning his cognac. She succeeded in
commiting suicide but he survived the laced drink and then
married Angelina, who was with him when he died at their
flat in the Dorotheengasse.
As Hrdlicka grew older and the physical damage caused by
lugging huge blocks of stone around his studio became
increasingly obvious he seemed to shrink. Physical problems
and the results of a stroke obliged him to have his ideas
for sculpture carried out by assistants and to concentrate
on drawing, and what became an important activity, his
theatre and opera designs: those for Faust and the Ring
became famous.
Perhaps the best of his graphic work is the series of
drawings, begun in 1968, called the Pl�tzensee Dance of
Death. Its title refers to the Berlin prison where the
conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 were
executed.
Towards the end of his life Hrdlicka's irritability and
tendency to explode in anger at what he took to be the
latest political idiocy were certainly worsened by his
diabetes, but his short temper was genuine enough, and he
treated his diabetes with a terrifying recklessness. By the
end of his life he was drinking up to two bottles of vodka a
day, had lost most of his sight and could scarcely walk.
Soon after his death the Austrian Arts Minister, Claudia
Schmied, described him as a "Titan of international art".
That he was not. Hrdlicka was the last lumbering example of
a once common left-wing sort of artist who argued that what
he did was political or it was nothing. So everything he
created as a sculptor, painter or draftsman expressed his
outrage at capitalism, fascism and war. "I'm a fossil," he
once admitted, "a Stone Age man. With a spine like a
dinosaur."
He is survived by his second wife. He had no children.
Alfred Hrdlicka, artist, was born on February 27, 1928. He
died on December 5, 2009, aged 81
La N
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:hh5a96$qbv$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> From The Times
> December 24, 2009
> Alfred Hrdlicka: artist
>
> Alfred Hrdlicka was one of the most prominent postwar Austrian artists,
> although there was not much competition for that title. He continued to
> carve large blocks of hard stone long after every other serious sculptor
> had changed to other materials.
Here are photos of some of his work:
- nilita