HELNWEIN: THE ARTIST AS PROVOCATEUR

[hest...@hotmail.com]

For anyone interested in Helnwein, I found this text to be very
helpful in understanding his work.
(To see the image that accompanies this text go to:
http://www.helnwein.com/texte/selected_authors/artikel_85.html)

1997
Helnwein Monograph, the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Peter Selz

Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, University of
California, Berkeley. Former Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York and founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum.

HELNWEIN: THE ARTIST AS PROVOCATEUR

Much like Joseph Beuys, who opened new, unexpected, and far-reaching
spheres for art, Gottfried Helnwein has made works that extend beyond
the art scene into the social and political realm. Like his
predecessor, he has moved beyond the realm of pure aesthetics,
engaging his art into the everyday world. Furthermore his principal
interest is not to express personal feelings and emotions, but to make
statements that go beyond the individual. He wants to see his work not
trapped on the walls of museums and galleries, but revealed in the
public domain. He expects his work to intervene in the social sphere
and to have a direct impact on the life of his time.

It is no longer the myths which need to be restructured . . . it is
the sign itself which must be shaken; the problem is not to reveal the
(latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to
fissure the very representation

In 1979 Gottfried Helnwein painted a watercolor of a pretty little
girl asleep on the table, her head on her plate and a spoon next to
her hand. Its title is "Life not Worth Living," and its text, an
integral part of the work, reads:

"Dear Dr. Gross! When I was watching 'Holocaust' (the TV program), I
thought again about your attitude as reported in the Kurier. And since
this is the Year of the Child, I want to take this opportunity to
thank you on behalf of the children who were taken to heaven under
your care. I want to thank you that they were not 'injected to death'
as you have called it, but simply died by having poison mixed into
their meals. With German Greetings, Yours, Gottfried Helnwein."

The watercolor was prompted by an interview in which Dr. Heinrich
Gross was asked by a reporter about the Nazi's euthanasia program in
which he and other physicians had killed children considered "not
worth living." He tried to vindicate his murders by claiming that he
simply poisoned their food, so that they could die quietly and without
pain.

When, in 1979, this same man became Austrian head of state psychiatry,
no one so much as wrote a letter of protest. Helnwein, incensed over
this profound political apathy, painted the watercolor, appended the
sarcastic letter, and published it in a Viennese journal. His
painting-cum-letter aroused discussion and was probably the cause for
Gross' subsequent resignation in disgrace. By this time Helnwein was
well aware that art can have a bearing on life.

Although the watercolor at first glance resembles the paintings of
American photorealists of the period, it also differs significantly.
Like their work, it is based on precise and detailed observation and
is done with a meticulous and pristine manner of finish. But Helnwein
diverges sharply from the photorealists in the meaningful content that
is the essence of his work. For him, art, like philosophy, raises
moral issues and becomes a denotative method of instruction, often by
subverting accepted norms and by provoking social change, it does not
simply reflect on itself. The British-American painter Malcolm Morley,
considered the first of the photorealist painters, asserted: "I have
no interest in subject matter as such or satire or social comment or
anything lumped together with subject matter... I accept the subject
matter as a by-product of the surface." For Helnwein, by contrast, the
What of a picture is more important than the How. He is a master of
paradox, and much of his work is characterized by its ambiguity.

Helnwein frequently turned to children for his subjects ? children as
innocent, weak, defenseless, and abused objects victimized by adults.
Typical also is a work such as "Embarrassing" (1971), a watercolor
depicting a small girl in her Sunday dress, sitting on the floor
against a white wall. Her bandaged left hand is placed on a comic
book, while her other emaciated arm and bandaged hand dangle on her
right. A horrible wound cuts across her face from nose to chin and
neck, while her eyes bulge. No expression or affect appears in this
doll-like child's face.

What, we must ask, prompted this artist to turn to images of
suffering, torture, and death? We must remember that during the
postwar years, when Helnwein was growing up in Vienna, nobody spoke of
the brutality of the Nazi period. Memories were suppressed, and
Austria's unrestrained embrace of Nazi savagery was denied as the
country attempted to pose as the "first victim of Fascism." This
depressing silence on the part of the Austrian petit-bourgeoisie was
very difficult for Gottfried to accept - he was a rebellious child,
interested in social and political questions, and curious and
inquisitive about the recent past.

Two further experiences left an indelible impression on the young man;
they are keys to his later works as an artist. He endured a very
strict Catholic upbringing, especially a suppressive and punishing
parochial school system, with its dogma of guilt and demand for
humility. Omnipresent in school, in church, were pictures and statues
of Christ's flagellation, the crowning with thorns, the crucifixion,
as well as graphic depictions of the stoning of St. Stephen, St.
Sebastian's arrow-pierced body, the cutting off of St. Agatha's
breasts - all torments to which Christian saints were subjected - and
these saints' apparent ecstasy as cherubim came flying down, offering
the palm of martyrdom.

In total contrast to this plethora of paintings of agony was
Helnwein's first elated encounter with the pictorial universe of Walt
Disney. Though scorned and considered dangerous by school authorities,
here was a beam of light. Later, in 1984, claiming that he had learned
more from Disney than from Leonardo da Vinci, the artist visited Carl
Barks in California to pay homage to the inventor of Donald Duck and
Uncle Scrooge McDuck. And when Gottfried Helnwein first saw a picture
of Elvis Presley on a chewing-gum card, he was enchanted.

In the continuing debate about high and low art, Helnwein completely
rejects the argument that popular art forms ? jazz, movies, comic
books, rock and roll ? corrupt the true and transcendental aesthetic
experience. He claims that in fact the split between high and low art
is elitist and totally artificial ? that Disney, like Picasso,
initiated a break with classical ideals of beauty and made a new
visual art with authentic emotional meaning: "Good comics, for me, is
sacred art," he once said. Helnwein is an artist who often uses his
own work for themes and images; he continues to be preoccupied with
Disney creatures. In 1993 he made a crayon drawing of Pablo Picasso
(after Brassaï's famous photograph) gazing at a grouchy little Donald
Duck in his hand. As part of the same series, we see "The Temptation
of Joseph Beuys" (1993), with Beuys seated in quiet contemplation as
he looks at a jubilant comic-strip character (see page 153), and
"Mozart's Skull" of the same year, with Donald Duck and a human skull.
In 1995 he made several large renderings of Duck in blue monochrome,
followed by a Mickey (1996), which measures over three meters across.
The artist's ongoing preoccupation with the Mouse and the Duck is
worth noting. He admires the animated creatures' vitality and
multiplicity of expression, and does not seem concerned about the
strangely asexual notions of the Disney families nor with the
capitalist entrepreneurship of the Duck family, nor the exploitation
of the imagination of the young and impressionable by the synthetic
Hollywood dream machine.

It is true, of course, that major artists have for a long time been
involved in popular art, often at the beginning of their careers.
Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard were among the finest designers of
art nouveau travel posters. Both Matisse and Picasso designed French
travel posters. Giacomo Balla, preceded by James Ensor, incorporated
graffiti in his paintings. Kurt Schwitters, master of detritus, used
everything from used train tickets to comic strips in his Merz
collages, and Richard Lindner spent many years as an illustrator and
art director before turning to painting. Andy Warhol designed shoe
advertisements; James Rosenquist made big billboards for Times Square;
Lyonel Feininger, followed by Öyvind Fahlstrom and Robert Crumb,
actually produced comic strips; and Roy Lichtenstein based his early
work on the comics, while Claes Oldenburg in the early 1970s designed
the Maus Museum in honor of the great animator. Helnwein then clearly
belongs to a viable tradition in modern art, a tradition in total
opposition to the formalist and puritanical construct of a critic like
Clement Greenberg, who juxtaposed avant-garde with kitsch, proclaiming
that a work of art must transcend the chaos of modern life.

The very essence of postmodernism is the interconnectedness that
erases boundaries between different aspects of culture, whether high
or low, in favor of creating polymorphous paradigms of multicultural
values. Rarely, however, has an artist so thoroughly inverted Walter
Benjamin's misgivings about lack of authenticity and the aura of
uniqueness of a work of art in the era of mechanical reproduction.
Helnwein has done this by embracing all the possibilities of
technological processes to bring art to the widest possible public. To
this end, he uses offset lithography, posters, magazine covers,
photographs, and large murals in the public area. By his carefully
calculated appearance and dress he even makes his own person into a
popular idol.

Early Years,
Education and Rebellion

Gottfried Helnwein looks back at his education in a Catholic gymnasium
as a catastrophe, and his goal has been largely to undermine and
destroy the repressive system based on the hateful intolerance
instilled by the Christian religion, which he considers the primary
source of fascism. He completely despised and rejected the school
system and his only desire was to paint. He abandoned school and was
admitted to the Experimental Institute of Higher Graphic Instruction
in 1965 ? an institution that was anything but experimental;
instruction proved to be totally traditional and conformist. In
rebellion against these constraints, Helnwein cut his hand with a
razor blade and with his own blood drew a picture of Adolf Hitler,
which outraged the school administration and made the young artist
aware for the first time of the potency of a picture. Soon thereafter
he was dismissed from the school.

Rejecting the art tradition of the Establishment and believing in the
primitive power of Trivial Art as a counter-aesthetic concept,
Helnwein wanted to be admitted to the Vienna Academy of Art, where he
could work autonomously in the great ateliers.

He had heard of Rudolf Hausner, on the Academy's faculty, and also the
oldest member of the school of fantastic realism, one of the major
trends in Viennese art in the postwar period. The other original
artists of this group were Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Wolfgang Hutter,
and Anton Lehmden. They had worked in the rubble of the destroyed and
divided city, finding the substance of their art in dream,
imagination, and fantasy. Most were students of Albert Paris Gütersloh
at the Vienna Academy; they also looked at the work of Albrecht
Altdorfer and other Renaissance masters of the Danube school. They
admired Persian miniature painting and were very much aware of the
surrealists, particularly Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte.
But rather than searching for the unconscious and the "pure psychic
automatisms" without recourse to conscious thought advocated by André
Breton, they explored personal symbols and actually have a greater
affinity with symbolist painters of the fin de siècle. By the early
1960s this group, together with Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose
work is distantly related to theirs, had achieved international
recognition.

At this time the international tachist movement, dominant among the
Academy faculty, was represented in Vienna by artists largely
sponsored by Monsignor Mauer at the Galerie St. Stephan: Austrian
artists such as Wolfgang Hollegha, Josef Mikl, Markus Prachensky and
the early Arnulf Rainer.

Rainer, an artist whom Helnwein holds in high esteem, was also at the
time connected to the group that became known as Wiener Aktionismus.
Sigmund Freud's city, sometimes referred to as the breeding ground of
neurosis, gave birth to this group of artists ? Günter Brus, Otto
Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler ? who felt that the
tachism, or action painting, they saw in the galleries could lead to
direct and actual life action on the part of the artists, an attitude
they shared with other artists in Europe (Mathieu, Klein), Japan
(Gutai) and the U.S.A. (Happenings, Performances). Kristine Stiles has
described the confrontational and cathartic aspects of these
artist-actions:

"Systematically assaulting repressive sexual mores, hypocritical
religious values, the overt destruction of war, and the covert
physical and psychological violence of the family, they created
confrontational, often sadomasochistic and misogynistic, actions aimed
at visualizing pain as a means of catharsis for healing. Scandalous in
form and content, their art led repeatedly to arrest, fines, and
imprisonment."

One artist, Schwarzkogler, who used bandaged figures for performances
dealing with castration, wounding, and healing, died in his twenties
in a fall, perhaps intentional, from his apartment window.

The Aktionists came to the attention of the art world (and the police)
only in the early 1970s, after Nitsch began his bloody performances of
the "Orgies Mysteries Theater" in Schloss Prinzenhof near Vienna. The
young Gottfried Helnwein was not aware of these events. As a result of
his rebellious attitude towards traditional art he had isolated
himself from the art world. He had never looked at an art book or
magazine, never gone to a museum to see an exhibition ? but he had
decided that he did want to go to the Academy and develop his own kind
of art.

To gain admission in 1969 he presented a painting titled
"Osterwetter." Painted in soft colors and evoking a melancholy mood,
it pictured two children who look very much like dolls; they have been
playing with a knife with which one has killed the other. Surely, this
imagery must have had its source in the pictures of bloody martyrdom
that the artist was raised with in the church. This initial painting,
rather naive in execution, was praised highly by Rudolf Hausner, who
at once accepted Helnwein in his class. Hausner, the only professor at
the Academy who was not an abstract painter, permitted his students
total freedom, explaining:

"Nothing falsifies the teaching process more than the attempt to
project the work of the teacher on the student. As I find myself in a
permanent state of self-analysis in my work, I am not likely to
confuse it with that of the student. I therefore never speak about my
work. The relationship is solely predicated on the special condition
of the student; and I work with him on nothing but his personal
development."

Helnwein for the first time in his life felt free to do and work as he
pleased. Yet he still objected to the school's heavy authoritarian
atmosphere and hierarchic organization. He must by now have been aware
of the wave of student rebellion which had spread from Berkeley to New
York, Paris and Prague in 1969. Swept up by the spirit of the time, he
and a few friends, wanting to affirm themselves, organized their own
carefully planned "Anarchist Aktion" against the Academy's antiquated
admission system. They used fire extinguishers, stink bombs, and
profuse smoke; they burnt doors, threw windows into the schoolyard.
Though nobody was injured, general panic ensued, and the resulting
publicity revealed the students' objections.

As part of his continuing protest against the establishment, and to
remind Austria of the recent past, toward which the country maintained
a policy of official denial, Helnwein once more painted a portrait of
Hitler and entered it in a student show, together with early
watercolors of bandaged children. But the Hitler painting engendered
many admiring responses from the public ? hardly surprising given the
nation's complicit silence about the Nazi era.

In 1972 Helnwein, still a student, performed his first Aktion pieces,
art-theater works documented with photographs. Like much of his other
art, they focused on children who were often bandaged and had wounds
inflicted with surgical instruments. These Aktion events are part of a
modernist tradition: art as acts of defiance against the
Establishment.

Art-theater goes back to futurist "scenographics", to Dada events in
Zurich, to Mayakovski's revolutionary Agit-props and on to the
performances of the 1960s. Unlike the slightly earlier Viennese
Aktionist artists, Helnwein did not use children's bodies as aesthetic
(or anti-aesthetic) objects, or as part of physical-sexual display.
His intent was to provoke a sense of outrage against the odious and
generally accepted treatment of the child as society's easy victim. He
continued his Aktion performances until 1976, when he performed
"Aktion Always Prepared." Here he appeared lying in the street with a
bandaged head; a passing woman or child tried to assist him, but most
passers-by walked on apathetically, ignoring the presumed accident
victim at their feet.

Self-Portraits

The artist also saw himself as victim and martyr. As early as 1970 he
had started to paint and photograph himself in an ongoing series of
self-portraits, some of them life-size with bandages around his head
and forks and surgical instruments piercing his mouth or cheek.
Frequently the distortions of these tormented images make it difficult
to recognize Helnwein's face. He appears as a screaming man, mirroring
the frightening aspects of life: a twentieth-century Man of Sorrows.
His frozen cry, showing the artist in a state of implacable trauma,
recalls Edvard Munch's "Scream" and Francis Bacon's screaming popes.
The cry in Helnwein's self-portraits is so loud that the viewer not
only sees the paintings - he seems to hear them too.

Some of Helnwein's grimacing faces also recall the grotesque and wild
physiognomic distortions ? quite possibly also self-portraits ? by the
eccentric eighteenth-century Viennese sculptor Franz Xavier
Messerschmidt. They could also be seen as part of the Austrian
pictorial tradition that resurfaced in the perturbed and distorted
expressionist faces painted by Kokoschka and Egon Schiele before World
War I, reappearing in the exaggerated wild mimicry in Arnulf Rainer's
"Face Farces."

Helnwein's related desire for self-exposure is manifested in a long
series of self-portraits as victim and victimizer. The earliest, a
photograph of 1970, prepared the ground for a watercolor on cardboard
of 1977. Depicting the artist's bust and head standing in splendid
isolation against a background of a vast blue sky, it has the
connotation of a modern icon. These self-portraits continued, altered
in many versions. They served as magazine covers and posters. Later
the artist incorporated his self-portraits into some of his fragmented
and ambiguous triptychs of the 1980s and 1990s. In a series entitled
"Untermensch" (Sub-Human), referring again to Nazi racial theory and
practice, he created many versions of his persona as bloodied martyr,
as Nazi officer, as romantic hero, warrior, tank commander, mummy,
guerrilla fighter, night wanderer, and concealed witness.

Always self-assertive and preoccupied with his own image, Helnwein
relates to the self-transformations by Cindy Sherman and her various
invented guises, disguises, disfigurements, and appropriated images
she uses to refer to her own persona. In a cibachrome photograph of
1987 entitled "Icarus," Helnwein wears a uniform, a green headband,
and dark glasses with blood running down his face as he holds out his
arm, beckoning the viewer. By 1988, in individual canvases and
triptychs, his face all but disappears in layers of oil and acrylic of
red or white abstractions, or it may reassert itself as a metallic
mechanical object ("Self-Portrait No. 12," 1988).

Drawings and Watercolors

Toward the end of his academic studies, Helnwein produced line
drawings in pencil. "Boys," "The Intrusion," "Me and You," and "Dr.
Dotter" (all of 1972) are caricatures, funny people with long noses
and droll expressions, which indicate his sources in the comic strip.
Then a major change becomes evident in his work. In 1975 he began a
series of extraordinary drawings in which he established his personal
calligraphy. Hair-thin lines create thorny thickets on the page, often
resulting in networks of spider webs of myriad penciled marks. They
are drawn, scratched, and, at times, scraped on transparent and/or
smooth paper. The result often resembles carefully executed etchings.
The hard and brittle lines also create dramatic light effects, and in
some of these visionary drawings, the light source appears to be
within a person or object.

Generally drawings make us more aware of the physical act of making a
picture than does painting, but rarely is the process of structuring
and restructuring as visible as it is in Helnwein's drawings of the
1970s. The result is a mysterious set of works depicting people often
engaged in bewildering activities. They are placed or confined in
rectangular empty rooms. Many of them are equipped with strange
fixtures and implements, or are subjected to perplexing actions. Some
are wearing bishops' miters, or bandages, or masks that hide their
faces. There are pipes and troughs and pits into which a person is
likely to fall or be submerged. Above all, there is a mysterious light
that reveals and conceals figures.

At first glance, the events depicted in these drawings do not seem as
strange as they become on longer perusal. Like surrealist art, these
drawings cannot be subjected to the rules of logic. They depict
nightmares and dreams, danger and threat. It seems most fitting that
Helnwein was commissioned in 1979 to furnish illustrations for a
German edition of Edgar Allan Poe's macabre tales.8 The exquisite
drawings in this book, with their sensitive treatment of blacks,
whites, and greys, have a chiaroscuro effect reminiscent of
Rembrandt's etchings.

Helnwein's drawings are essays in black humor and personal satire. W.
H. Auden once remarked that satire is both angry and optimistic,
postulating evil and also its potential arrogation. Helnwein's
drawings embody both a sense of gruesome phantasmagoria and possible
hope. To find historical precedents, we must look at Goya's
"Caprichos." Here the Spanish artist of the Enlightenment pictured
man's incongruities, injustices, stupidities, and cruelties, hoping
that these depictions might help people to replace superstition with
reason. Closer to home are the visionary and hallucinatory drawings by
the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin, known for his fictive, baffling,
and, at times, violent drawings. An original member of the Blue Rider
group, he was banished by the Nazis as punishment for being a
"degenerate artist," but continued working in isolation. In 1959, the
year of his death, the Galerie St. Stephan in Vienna mounted a
memorial exhibition for Kubin, who once again became a well-known
artist in Austria.

Intimately related to Helnwein's Aktion pieces of the early 1970s were
his series of watercolors, such as the previously mentioned "Life not
Worth Living" and the earlier "Embarrassing." He devised a unique dry
watercolor technique that employed the minimum of water (the opposite
of the typical wet watercolors done by Emil Nolde, for example).
Helnwein applied pigment with the thinnest brush and was able to
achieve illusionistic light effects by scratching with a razor blade
into the paint. In "Mean Child" (1970), possibly the earliest work in
the series, he presents a frontal head of a girl, eyes staring at the
viewer, blood emerging from her mouth and a gash across her cheek.
Various parts of her face are labeled with captions: "Lewd,"
"Improper," "Careless," "Happy to Be Punished," or "Talking about
Sex." This watercolor by the 22-year-old artist evokes a sense of
melancholy that pervades much of his work. The theme of the girl as
victim is seen in disquieting watercolors such as "Little Correction"
(1971), "Embarrassing" (1971), and "The Intrusion" (1972). The last
depicts a young blonde girl strapped to a table while an enormous
shiny metal tube is forced into her mouth. Helnwein's drawing of a man
thrusting a girl's mouth open with strong hands is seen hanging on the
wall behind the main scene of cruelty. One of the most successful
pictures in the series is "Sunday's Child" (1972): Here an apparently
happy, smiling blonde girl, her tongue playfully sticking out, holds
some chocolates in her hand as she stands in front of a store that has
food ads on its window, much as one would see at such a store or in a
pop painting. A cute little duckling holding an ice cream cone smiles
as it walks along the sidewalk. As you look more closely, you see that
the child wears the identifying armband of the blind, and that blood
runs down her leg. We do a double-take: what does it mean? Is she
menstruating early in life? Was she raped? As Helnwein so often does,
here he provokes shock, horror, and the dread of violence.

In his extensive interview with Andreas Mäckler, Helnwein remarked: "I
am aware that individuals on this planet are badly abused and
maltreated, that they are deeply injured and suppressed, and that it
is all covered up with optimistic propaganda. A long time before I
began painting, I had the impression that mankind is in a bad state,
that nobody lives without pain even if this is repressed, and that
there is evidently a longing to overcome this and to rise above it.
Especially my early pictures deal with these concerns and hold them up
to the viewer."

The artist was also preoccupied with the image of a young girl with
bandaged head and hand. She appears in a series of watercolors done in
the softest of muted colors, with a predominant pale, greyish blue.
"Beautiful Victim I" (1974) shows the girl lying on the floor in
sunlight. In "Beautiful Victim II" (1974), she stands by a window, and
in the last work of the series, "Red Mouth" (1978), we see her with
forehead and chin in surgical dressing, stretched out on a white
bolster and wearing a white shirt and red lipstick. Her eyes closed,
she seems to be sleeping, dreaming, or suffering. This poignant
picture resonates with intimations of deep pain. It is work of great
sadness, reminding us of Nietzsche's remark that the "authenticity of
the creative artist can supply meaning to the despair and absurdity of
existence."

Photographs, Theater Designs

Helnwein, who had been using the camera to document his street actions
and for self-portraiture, concentrated on photography as a major
medium in his work in the early 1980s. He decided to take photographic
portraits of icons of contemporary culture, both high and low, that he
was particularly interested in. In 1982 he went to London to meet with
the Rolling Stones, with whom he had identified when a youth in
Vienna; there he took a somber photograph of Mick Jagger.

In his early photographic portraits, Helnwein's personal style becomes
evident. His portraits are not idealized images like those of Edward
Steichen, or grandly composed portraits, like those of Arnold Newman,
who both photographed artists, composers, and writers in relation to
their work. They also differ from Robert Mapplethorpe's smooth and
highly finished portraits, but do relate to the incisive and poignant
portraits by Richard Avedon.

Helnwein does not do his own darkroom work, nor does he manipulate the
printed images, but takes advantage of the camera as an instrument for
observation. He was able to examine the faces of his sitters in
isolation and to focus on specific details.

Susan Sontag, in her frequently quoted essay "On Photography," sees
the medium as "a powerful instrument for depersonalizing the world."
This may well be true in the case of war photographs, which she cites
as an example. It certainly does not apply to portraitists like Avedon
and Helnwein.

Photography equipped Helnwein with a means of constructing a picture
in a manner different from painting, and permitted new possibilities
in the visual relationship between artist and model: the photographer
can become a participant and an observer. Helnwein made an outstanding
series of photos of Andy Warhol in 1983, four years before the
artist's early death. Warhol, above all, had "deghettoized"
photography and had shattered the traditional hierarchy that defined
"art." Helnwein's portraits of him do not show the young man of easy
elegance and indifferent mien, but a tragic figure facing death.

There are very few other pictures of painters among Helnwein's
photographs, but pop painter Roy Lichtenstein appears, with sly,
smiling eyes, and so does Keith Haring as a young man, a quizzical but
intense expression on his face. The majority of the photos are of rock
stars, such as Michael Jackson (beautifully coiffured), Lou Reed, and
Keith Richards. The latter, prominently displaying his skull ring,
Helnwein referred to as a man with "the face of a redeemer." Of course
there is also the friendly face of the Disney animator Carl Barks, and
one of a very relaxed Billy Wilder. There are portraits of Peter
Ludwig, the foremost collector of modern art, and of the leading
gallerist, a tired-looking Leo Castelli. Important political figures
appear: Willy Brandt, Lech Walesa, and Simon Wiesenthal; the actors
Clint Eastwood, looking somewhat wary, and Maximilian Schell, with an
intense expression.

A good many writers are also included: the Austrian poet H. C.
Artmann, and the East German author Heiner Müller. Helnwein had an
affinity with the writings of William S. Burroughs and photographed
him in Lawrence, Kansas, the unlikely place to which the exotic
novelist had repaired in his old age. Burroughs insisted on bringing
his revolver to the sitting, and Helnwein portrayed him with eyes
closed and a sinister expression that evokes the sense of grim horror
communicated in his writings. In the introduction to the catalogue of
Helnwein's "Faces" for the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (1992), Burroughs
stated:

"It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised
recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know he
knows. Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition."

Helnwein was also fascinated by Norman Mailer's life and work; he met
him at a PEN conference in New York, and photographed him in his
summer home in Provincetown. Mailer's alert face, outlined by an
aureole of white hair, squints into the sunlight. Like so many of
these photographs, it is a brilliant study of black and white. Light
is, in fact, a principle signifier in Helnwein's photos. Mailer
considers him to be "one of the few exciting painters we have today."

Gottfried Helnwein also wanted to take photographs of "the last
witnesses who were close to the center of power, which caused the
catastrophe," and photographed the two leading artists responsible for
the dominating aesthetics of the Third Reich. Arnold Breker, Hitler's
favorite sculptor, had created bronze colossi of heroic nude male
figures for major Nazi buildings ? figures in a corrupted classical
guise and embodying the ideal of strength and power of the new pure
Germany. One of the Helnwein photographs shows the aged sculptor with
a suspicious expression and holding a watercolor portrait of Joseph
Beuys painted by Helnwein in 1982. Breker tried to justify his Fascist
activities to Helnwein by claiming that like Renaissance artists, he
simply worked on commissions for the reigning powers. He claimed that
he almost went to the Soviet Union on a similar assignment from
Stalin, and that he also might have taken a commission for a huge
sculpture monument, to be called "Liberated Africa," offered by the
government of the Ivory Coast.

In 1990, Helnwein also took a stunning photo of Leni Riefenstahl, a
very old lady with a slight smirk on her face. She was the film maker
who had directed the great propaganda spectacles of the Nazi party,
which glorified the power of the Führer and celebrated the disciplined
male body. Both artists, not unlike Adolf Eichmann, pleaded that by
discharging their commissions, they were really only following orders,
and that they had no political agendas of their own.

Helnwein also used his photographs of popular icons for hagiographic
paintings or magazine covers; these images differ perceptibly from the
original photograph; he proceeded similarly with photos of idols of
the twentieth century, such as Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Beuys, and
Marlene Dietrich, with whom he worked on a book about Berlin in 1991.
There was also the portrait of James Dean that pictured the juvenile
movie idol walking alone through slush in the early morning hours in a
deserted Times Square. It became one of the painter's most popular
works.

In 1990, Helnwein made a large assemblage of paintings based on
photographs. Called "48 Portraits," it depicts 48 women of
achievement. Done in muted reds, it is the artist's response to
Gerhard Richter's well-known "48 Portraits" of twenty years earlier,
in black and white, and limited solely to males.

Helnwein's reputation in Austria became confirmed when Walter
Koschatzky, director of the Albertina, mounted a major solo exhibition
in 1985 for the 37-year-old artist at Vienna's great graphics museum.
But the following year Helnwein left Austria, that tightly wrapped
country where he had always felt alienated, and settled in a castle in
the foothills of the Eifel Mountains south of Cologne.

Two years earlier, the Municipal Museum in Munich had organized a
Helnwein solo show that attracted over 100 000 visitors. One of them
was Peter Zadek, one of Germany's most original and provocative
theater directors, who asked him to make a poster for John Hopkins's
"Loosing Time" for the Hamburger Schauspielhaus. In 1988, he made his
controversial "Lulu" poster, which showed a little man dressed in a
heavy overcoat gazing at a girl's naked crotch. A minor scandal ensued
when the mayor of Hamburg protested, accusing Zadek and Helnwein of
pornography. Also in 1988, however, the artist began designing sets
and costumes for a series of brilliant productions by the
choreographer and director Hans Kresnik, including "Macbeth," "King
Lear," and "Oedipus" in Heidelberg, and "Marat/Sade" in Stuttgart. His
vanguard designs for "Carmina Burana" for the Munich Staatsoper,
however, were rejected on grounds of being too radical for the
Bavarian capital. In 1996 Helnwein did the designs for a great
production of Pasolini in Hamburg.

Public Art and Triptychs

In the late 1980s, the artist felt the need for work on a larger scale
in the public domain. In November 1988, commemorating the fiftieth
anniversary of the vandalism, destruction, and killing of
Kristallnacht (9 November 1938), Helnwein installed 17 pictures of
young boys and girls. We are accustomed to seeing pictures of smiling
children with sparkling eyes. But these grim, iconic faces, no less
than four meters high, face the viewer with expressions of grief. The
artist sprayed the images with paint in a process called scannachrome.
He mounted them in a 100-meter-long line on a wall between Cologne's
main railroad station and its famous cathedral ? a space through which
thousands of people pass each day.

The work was highly controversial. Having been unable to find a
sponsor, the artist had to do it at his own expense. But this powerful
photographic testimony provoked an examination of Nazi atrocities and
was widely published in the press and on television. Within a few
days, some of the pictures had been slashed by angry citizens and one
panel was stolen. Simon Wiesenthal, writing in the catalogue of this
exhibition, was moved to say: "People, please stop . . . look at these
children's faces, multiply them by a few hundred thousand. Only then
will you realize an inkling of the extent of the Holocaust, of the
greatest tragedy."

Helnwein continued to paint heads of children related to the
"Kristallnacht" installation, and he created a painting on a heroic
scale, "Kindskopf," for a Gothic church in Krems/Stein in Lower
Austria in the spring of 1991. This work, six meters high, was
installed at the end of the nave in the great arch of the church, the
place that once separated the monks from the congregation. Pictures by
three of Helnwein's four children, Ali Elvis, Amadeus, and Mercedes,
were mounted on the columns and exhibited in the church for the
duration of the installation. "Kindskopf" is now permanently placed in
the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

At about the same time the painter made "White Christmas" (1992), one
of his rare works in three dimensions. Done in plaster with pollen
sprayed on the surface, it is a group of 48 children without faces.
They are not merely standing in space, but appear to crowd in on the
unsuspecting viewer. Helnwein works on many programs simultaneously.
In the late 1980s he also began a series of large triptychs. The
triptych, which frequently served as the sacred altarpiece in Northern
medieval churches, was revived as an art form in the late nineteenth
century by artists such as Hans von Marées and found its culmination
in the nine great triptychs by Max Beckmann. Helnwein's "The Silent
Glow of the Avant-Garde" (1986) relates to this German tradition. Its
centerpiece is a reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich's "The Sea of
Ice" (1823-24), a painting that referred directly to the wreck of the
ship "Hope" in its attempt to discover the passage to the North Pole.
But in keeping with Friedrich's existential and religious pessimism,
the work alludes more generally to the manifestation of fate and
destructive forces in nature. Gottfried Helnwein included his own
image, with blood on headband and shirt, on either side of the ship,
which has been destroyed by blocks of ice. It responds to Friedrich's
romantic painting in which human endeavor is vanquished by nature,
with a contemporary version of defeat.

Caspar David Friedrich, a professor at the Dresden Academy, was
closely associated with the Dresden circle of Romantic poets. More
than a century later, in February 1945, Dresden, one of the world's
most beautiful cities, was destroyed by Allied firebombing. Helnwein
used a picture of the devastated city as the center panel of the
triptych "Song of the Deputies" (1996). The side panels show
self-portraits of the artist with a bandage over his head and eyes,
and a harrowing clamp between his tongue and nose.

The blue monochrome lends a new sense of magical distance to his work;
the color became predominant during the last decade. An ingenious
"Annunciation" of 1991 depicts a young girl sitting on her bed and
watching a TV screen from which, as in Woody Allen's "Purple Rose of
Cairo," the white shadow of an angel emerges, beckoning toward the
presumptive virgin. In "Night III" (1990), also a monochrome but
created and developed on a computer then transferred to canvas by an
ink-jet process before being overpainted with acrylic and oil, the
child stands in front of the television set while two chilling men,
whose faces have been rubbed out to make them indistinct, sit next to
her. "Night II" of the same year shows soldiers running in the dark of
night toward their own death. The portrait of his son, "Ali Elvis"
(1991), is a poignant image of a solitary figure. The different tones
of blue provide a mysterious glow to the child's body and his head,
with its closed eyes. In the same year Helnwein painted two large
canvases, "Fire-Man" and "Ice-Man," in blue monotone, both based on
photographs of men who were wounded in World War I. He painted these
disfigured faces with an out-of-focus blur that creates images of
powerful presence.

Occasionally the artist made use of color, as in the huge triptych,
six meters in width, "Vienna Panorama" (1995). It shows the artist
surrounded by his paints, solvents, and brushes, as he paints a grand
panorama of his native city.

For eight years, from 1988 to 1996, the artist worked on a large blue
monochrome, "Turkish Family," with seven people occupying the same
room and appearing to sit for their photo. This social comment plumbs
the deep division between the Germans and the immigrant Turkish
Gastarbeiter (guest workers). There is a Turkish woman with four
children ? the boys wearing Mickey Mouse caps ? on one side of the
room, looking at the viewer as if he were behind the camera, while two
German ladies, appearing very suburban in their short skirts,
literally look down their noses at the immigrant family. To add to the
confounding of this disparate group, there are three computers, their
screens placed at random in the room.

Working with totally different subjects, Helnwein made the triptych "3
Poets" in 1994. They are portraits of Goethe, Heine, and Thomas Mann.
The former two are based on famous painted portraits of the poets, the
latter on a well-known photograph of Mann. It seems that Helnwein
wanted to recapture the images of the classicist, the idealist, and
the rationalist among great German writers.

Between 1994 and 1996 Helnwein made a series of perhaps a hundred
dark-blue monochromes, which he entitled "Fire." These paintings, done
in oil and acrylic and based on photographs of writers, painters,
poets, composers, scientists, film makers, political activists,
actors, philosophers, and pop stars, are depictions of the rebels of
the twentieth century who were going against the current of the
established culture of their time. These portraits are painted in the
darkest blue, with a veil over the faces, making them exceedingly
difficult to detect, even in daylight. They create a sense of
ineffable ambiguity, and it takes time and attention to raise the
faces into recognition of their identity. The obscurity of the images
makes for a significant continuity between the invisible and the
visible in these paintings.

With enough distance from his childhood, both in time and feeling,
Helnwein was eventually able to respond to his religious upbringing in
a different way. Instead of martyrs, he now avails himself of themes
like the Virgin mourning over Christ's dead body or the Madonna and
Child ? always with the purpose of making the viewer reexamine the
authority of traditional values.

The large "Pieta Lutz" (1994) depicting a father with his son
stretched out on his lap, is a painting of close friends of the
artist. As its name implies, it also reflects on Christian
iconography. Here we have a masculine Pieta with homoerotic
connotations questioning the archetypal Christian symbolism. Related
to this painting is the series of dark-blue Madonna paintings. This
group actually began with works in pencil, like "Virgin with Pinocchio
after Bronzino," and another drawing of the Madonna with a mutilated
Christ Child, after a painting by Mantegna. In 1996, again using the
computer-painting and ink-jet method, Helnwein painted a series of
Madonnas in which he adopted images of the Virgin and Child taken from
well-known paintings by Leonardo or Caravaggio and transferred them
onto the canvas, then overpainting the image with oil and acrylic,
leaving it all in monochrome darkness. In these works, the paint
subsumes and becomes coexistent with the photograph; it becomes a new
signifier, which inverts the familiar images. The Madonna paintings no
doubt presented themselves quite intuitively to this former Catholic,
and they led to Helnwein's significant "Epiphany" of 1996. This large
(210 x 33 cm) painting in blue monochrome depicts the Adoration of the
Magi. But the Madonna is a young maiden of pure Aryan blood, and
presents a Christ Child who looks like a young Adolf Hitler, and the
Wise Men all wear well-tailored SS and Reichswehr uniforms, Nazi
officials decorated with the Iron Cross. They stand attentively, with
approving respect, next to the Virgin. The most prominent Nazi holds a
document in his hands, while the soldier on the right seems to examine
the child, perhaps to see whether he is circumcised. It is a powerful
and very enigmatic painting, done with the eyes and brush of a realist
painter.

In 1998 Helnwein expects to enlarge this work to enormous size and
display a version of it at the Königsplatz, the grand neo-Grecian
square that also served as the center for Nazis' mass meetings and
ostentatious rituals, and which Hitler called the "community space for
the Volk."

Much like Joseph Beuys, who opened new, unexpected, and far-reaching
spheres for art, Gottfried Helnwein has made works that extend beyond
the art scene into the social and political realm. Like his
predecessor, he has moved beyond the realm of pure aesthetics,
engaging his art into the everyday world. Furthermore, his principal
interest is not to express personal feelings and emotions, but to make
statements that go beyond the individual. He wants to see his work not
trapped on the walls of museums and galleries, but revealed in the
public domain. He expects his work to intervene in the social sphere
and to have a direct impact on the life of his time. For this to
occur, the viewer must, of course, respond to the artist's work, which
is, after all, only half of the process of communication. Helnwein's
paintings and photographs, so acute in their message, indeed
facilitate our participation as viewers, which is necessary to
complete the transmission. Using a profusion of mediums, Gottfried
Helnwein leads us into an area of controversial reflection.

-- Gottfried Helnwein, retrospective, the State Russian Museum, St.
Petersburg
1997 Helnwein Monograph, the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Peter Selz

More articles about the Helnwein retrospective at the State Russian
Museum in St. Petersburg:

Kommersant Daily
Russia

Frontpage
EXHIBITION IN THE STATE RUSSIAN MUSEUM, ST PETERSBURG
Gottfried Helnwein- Retrospective in the State Russian Museum, St
Petersburg ...
http://www.helnwein.com/presse/international_press/artikel_285.html

10.Oct.1996
Kölner Stadt Anzeiger
Lothar Deeg

EIN MÄDCHENKOPF FÜR SANKT PETERSBURG
Peter Ludwig schenkte Museum Helnwein-Bilder
"Anna aus, ich glaube, Kiel", war die unübersehbare Hauptfigur bei der
Eröffnung der Ausstellung des österreichischen Malers Gottfried
Helnwein im Russischen Museum in Sankt Petersburg.
Wenn Kunst aus dem Westen den Weg nach Russland findet - um dort zu
bleiben -, stehen zwei den Petersburgern inzwischen wohlbekannte Namen
dahinter:
Irene und Peter Ludwig, die dem Russischen Museum wieder eine
Schenkung gemacht haben.
Mit jeder seiner exakt gezeichneten Hautporen und jeder Wimper ist
dieses Kind Subjekt - und nicht nur einfach Objekt für einen Maler,
der Gigantismus mit Detailversessenheit kombiniert.
"Menschlichkeit im Riesenmass", interpretierte Ludwig das Bild.
http://www.helnwein.com/presse/international_press/artikel_285.html

Further press and essays on the Helnwein retrospective in the State
Russian Museum:

http://helnweinreviews.com/books_06_helnwein_1998.htm

http://helnweinreviews.com/books_17_helnwein_1992.htm

http://helnweinreviews.com/books_08_helnwein_1997.htm

http://www.helnweinreviews.com/

Helnwein's newest series of paintings are being exhibited at Modernism
gallery in San Francisco at the moment (9 Sep to 2 Nov). They are
some of my personal favorites of. To see them, go to:
http://modernisminc.com/

Official website of Gottfried Helnwein:
http://www.helnwein.com/home/home/home.html

This is the official website of Helnwein in a German version:
http://www.helnwein.de/home/home/home.html