Thoughts on art
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Downtown Los Angeles
THOUGHTS ON ART
Excerpts of a conversation between Gottfried Helnwein and Patrick
Morrison at Helnwein's studio in downtown Los Angeles about Patrick's
upcoming exhibition in Waterford.
Gottfried Helnwein:
The first works I saw of yours were the movie-theater paintings, and I
remember your essay about them: "Memories of the Savoy." It reminded
me a lot of my own childhood. That contrast between this fantastic
world of wonders and miracles on the screen, and the bleak and poor
world we lived in.
I think Austria after the War and Ireland were in many ways similar -
both small and poor countries, so heavily dominatad by the Roman
Catholic Church.
Patrick Morrison:
Yeah. Well, I suppose it was the realization that another world existed
- this kind of mythic world from the future - and I suppose it also
coincided with rock and roll and the culture in general. The cinema was
like the cathedral of American culture, in a way. It was a kind of
mythology that we grew up with. It wasn't ancient mythology. It was
almost like a mythology from the future world that was starting to
inundate Europe. The goddesses and the gods of the cinema, and the
heroes and the villains and evil, the gangsters and the sexpots - the
whole America.
Helnwein:
And then there was also Rock 'n' roll.
Morrison
Yeah. All of a sudden it was Elvis.
I heard him on the radio one day. We all came home from school and had
lunch, which was essentially our dinner, and we would all listen to the
radio. There was a show that actually continued until recently called
The Kennedy's of Castle Ross. The whole country would listen to it,
and one day it hit. I came home and it was Don't Be Cruel - Elvis.
I remember going over to a cousin's place. We used to go there every
Christmas on Boxing Day. This cousin was really hip. In fact, he was a
painter as well.
The first time I smelled oil paint was in their little, dark kitchen.
It was fascinating. But upstairs in the parlor they had a gramophone. I
remember hearing Little Richard for the first time. I just played it
over and over and over. I must have played it for hours. I couldn't
believe it. It was so amazing. I don't know how we're going to get
from this to talking about painting, but I think that there is
something within us-our response to that.
Helnwein:
Right. This new culture had such a fundamental influence on our
generation.
Marrison:
Definitely, yeah. I suppose it's that kind of primitive energy or
something.
But I always think of the movies, as regards painting. Especially when
I came to America. Edward Hopper's paintings are very small in a
sense, but they have incredible scope - and the space. I'm thinking
of one in particular - that motel painting. The Western Motel, or
something like that, where there is a very enormous window and you're
looking out onto a Western mesa or something like that. The woman is
sitting on the bed. And that kind of color as well - that early kind
of Technicolor, like James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. That final
scene where he was laying dead...which was inspired by Manet's Dead
Toreador.
I know that my friend Wim [Wenders] was very inspired by painting, and
especially by Edward Hopper's paintings. I guess there's a sense of
space and looking at the west.
Helnwein:
How old were you when you came here?
Morrison:
I was nineteen when I came to America.
Helnwein:
You were a painter already when you came?
Morrison:
Yeah, I was. Definitely. I had been painting. I hadn't committed
myself to painting yet. I was in the Bay Area. This was at the height
of the Bay Area figurative painting. I had actually been to New York
and I saw this big Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Helnwein:
What were the first paintings that had an enduring impact on you?
Morrison:
When I went to the National Gallery for the first time, I was about 15
years old. I had never been to a museum before. And, I have a distinct
recollection of everything I saw and the effect it had on me. I saw
Veronese's Allegories of Love, and all the great Titians and
Tintorettos. Cézanne's Bathers was already shimmering and shaking.
Before I even entered the room, it felt like it was going full tilt.
It's never stopped since. It has a permanent charge.
Helnwein:
Yeah.
Morrison:
When I look at Titian or I look at Cézanne, I feel I have gone deeper
and deeper into that world. I haven't moved away. It's not a linear
thing. And I think you perceive life as a painter - even driving
around LA. In a sense, it's what makes life tolerable to me. All the
torments of modern living become tolerable because you're distracted
by the wonderful visual nature of them.
Helnwein:
Right.
Morrison:
And maybe that's a kind of a function of art. I don't know. To make
life more tolerable. Just the visual sensation. I know art works like
that.
Helnwein:
I think any so-called reality has many possibilities - many layers.
No matter how bad or painful something might seem, it always has also
an aesthetic dimension.
And I think artists have the ability to see that, whereas most people
are not aware of that potential quality. They usually experience mainly
the painful side of life.
However, art, painting, music or writing, offer the possibility to
transcend the misery of existence.
Morrison:
Yeah.
Helnwein:
In any catastrophy, decadence, pain or sorrow, there is such a big
potential of poetic quality and aesthetics.
Morrison:
Yeah, I suppose ultimately it's a kind of transcendence. I think I
remember Yehudi Menuhin's sister survived Auschwitz, and she
attributed it to the fact that she had Bach's fugues in her head. She
could listen to them. She could play them in her head.
And I think art is in that respect. Nowadays, everything is kind of
fragmented. Culture and art, even though they overlap, are separate
phenomena. I think there was a time when art and ritual, religious
ceremonies, music, theater-it was all one.
Helnwein:
That's right.
Morrison:
The whole thing was to lift us, and to commune with the gods. And I
think that need still remains, although nowadays, it is completely
fragmented. In the sixties, it seemed there was a massive attempt
through music and art that even embraced the civil rights and the
anti-war movements, to effect a universal change of consciousness. Max
Beckman for me was the great painter of the zeitgeist of the sixties,
even though the paintings were done decades before. I first became
familiar with him in San Francisco, and I was struck by the way Bob
Dylan's lyrics seemed almost to depict Beckman's world. For
instance, the song Desolation Row starts: "they're selling post
cards to the hanging, they're painting the passports brown, the
beauty parlors are getting filled, the circus is in town... Here comes
the blind commissioner, they got him in a trance, one hand tied to the
tightrope walker, the other one's in his pants."
***
Helnwein:
Did Rock and Roll have a big influence on you?
Morrison:
Well, I've been very close to rock and roll. I've met a lot of rock
and rollers. I see them in a strange way - almost like ancient
prophets or something. Rimbaud predicted a time when poets would move
the masses of humanity.
I think that rock and roll is like that. There's a Flaubert novel -
it's a little novella. I can't remember what it's called. It's
about John the Baptist and King Herod. There are descriptions of out in
the desert, about John the Baptist preaching and moving people to a
point of almost hysteria. Jesus must have been like that - the effect
that he must have had upon people. I think there is something that runs
through, way back down the ages that in some way connects with rock and
roll. I think it probably comes through black music, through gospel
music and blues, where there is that connection - that kind of
ancient alchemy of the early prophets.
Helnwein:
In that sense blues would be very close to Irish music.
Morrison:
Definitely, yeah. They were talking about the same thing.
It's all codified in a sense. The main thing was to lift you up. Even
though you're talking about the most dire misfortunes, and the sorrow
of having to leave your country or the sorrow of being executed by the
British or whatever. It still moves you and lifts you - I don't
know what it is. And in some strange way, I think painting is very
different. I think in the course of time, it has a kind of enduring
effect. I know that last year, just recently, I was back in London with
the kids. We went to the National Gallery and I saw all those wonderful
paintings that I grew up with. They moved me more than ever.
Helnwein:
Yeah.
Morrison:
There are astonishing things at the British Museum - the bassai
friezes from the Parthenon. Just incredible stuff. There is a
connection. The friezes are called centaur marquis. It's a man
fighting with centaurs. Essentially it's war, but it's war in a
mythical timeless sense.
Some kind of essence of war coming into sculpture. There's this
incredible kind of contraposto, and it's all around the room. I think
there's something about that which relates very much to music. Music
is very sculptural. Rock and roll certainly is. Keith Richards twists
cords around. It's almost like Francis Bacon in the way he twists
figures around.
The basic thing is that the music-whether it's Bach or whether
it's the Rolling Stones or whatever-is a kind of very visceral
immediate sensation.
Helnwein:
Yeah.
Morrison:
And it hits you. I remember the first time I saw Cézanne's Bathers
in the National Galley in London. It was already oozing, shimmering,
and shaking before I even entered the room. It was going full tilt when
I saw it. And it didn't stop. It's never stopped since then. It's
that charge.
Helnwein:
Then you come back a year later and look at it and it's still there
and it's bigger than ever. It grows.
Morrison:
I think it is a performance. It is a record of a performance that you
do day to day. It's this solitary drama that goes on from day to day.
Helnwein:
Right.
Morrison:
And that never ends. There is no end to it.
***
Morrison:
When I first came to America I sought out the great blues musicians. I
saw Howling Wolf and so on. But even with the greatest, it was just
these dismal little clubs late at night. Those are timeless moments
when time stops still and just a few people are there, but it's so
great you wouldn't want to be anywhere else on the planet.
Helnwein:
When you came to the United States, did you start painting right away
here?
Morrison:
I did, yeah. For a few years I was really just caught up with the wild
stuff in the sixties. I landed right in the middle of the scene, what
was happening. The Merry Pranksters and Neal Cassady. Eventually I met
everyone. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Timothy Leary. All these people.
But I did paint.
I became familiar with Beckmann and Edward Hopper. And then, of course,
pop art was going full tilt at that time. I think the first English pop
art show in London was very close to where I lived - at the
Whitechapel Gallery.
Andy Warhol loomed really large. I saw some amazing paintings that he
did, some of those electric chairs. First-rate paintings. I guess
it's the phenomenon of Andy Warhol and the effect that he has on the
culture at the time. I don't think New York would be New York without
Andy Warhol.
That was a time when it was all kind of one in a sense - even the
whole political aspect, the Viet Nam War and movies. I remember seeing
Alphaville, which was a very loving parody of film noir from Jean Luc
Godard. I think in some way just the interpretation of modern life of
the sixties - maybe the art is what remains. This is the real history
Helnwein:
What people very often don't realize is that without art there is no
history.
Whenever we think of a great time - may it be Rome, Egypt, France
under Louis XIV or whatever - what do we think of? We think of works
of art - architecture, music, literature, fashion, design. That's how
we define a specific period. So if art did not exist, there would be no
sense of history.
And without art there would probably be no religion. Because if you
take art out of it, - the music, the songs, the architecture,
paintings and sculptures, costumes and the choreography - religion
would be totaly abstract and people could not relate to it.
There would be no religion, there would be no history.
- When we think of the sixties, we associate this crazy art and
fashion, we think of certain music and certain colors.
All that.
Sometimes I think maybe the sixties were the last great epoch - like
you said - where all was one.
Morrison:
Yeah. I don't think we've been able to deal with everything. It's
only in the course of time.
One thing that I think was really vital for me was color field
painting. I remember seeing this enormous Ad Reinhardt painting in
Washington. It was all red. It was orange-red, magenta-red - reds. An
enormous painting. So you're completely engulfed. Everything just
kept changing. You're kind of overwhelmed by the optical effect. And
you couldn't stop it. You could close your eyes and it would keep on
going in your head. I think there were amazing discoveries around that
time.
Helnwein:
The same goes for music too. Suddenly, Jimi Hendrix used instruments in
a completely different way and produced sounds that had never been
heard before. Painters did the same thing with combinations of colors,
images and new media that had never been used in connection with art
before. The development was so fast that it was impossible to be fully
grasped at the time.
Morrison:
Well, there was just such extraordinary experimentation in music. And
there were all kinds of cross-fertilization of dance. John Cage and
Merce Cunningham and Rauschenberg. And, of course, William Burroughs.
Helnwein:
It all started at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th
century with Rimbaud, Kandinsky, Dada, Schiele, Schönberg, Malevich,
Mayakovsky and then Duchamp and Artaud, and very important: early black
music and dance from America: blues, ragtime, Jazz...
But the world-wars and the collapse of civilisation through the triumph
of Ideological insanity interrupted that flow for a while, and it seems
in the sixties, we continued from that point on. It was, as you said
the next step.
Morrison:
As far as my work goes, I would say that my whole vision, the road that
I took off on starts back there in the sixties. And it's hard to know
where it goes. But of course, it's a road without beginning or end
that takes us into a timeless realm.
In a sense we look back into - it's not really back into time.
It's back into timelessness or forward into timelessness.
Helnwein:
Right.
Morrison:
In recent years, I've begun to really think of Pompeiian painting,
for instance, as being very modern.
Helnwein:
True.
Morrison:
They were very modern people. From two hundred B.C. until maybe two
hundred A.D., amazing things were happening in Egypt, in China and
India. It was a golden age. They were very modern. They were literate.
They had plumbing. It was a flourishing kind of bourgeois society. They
were very sophisticated. What they had on the walls was this wonderful
kind of atmospheric painting. But it was ancient mythology. Nymphs and
fauns. Priapus and Venus. That was the ancient world. We think of them
as being ancient, but they are really not far removed from us.
* * * *
Morrison:
I think ultimately all painting is decorative in the sense that it
enhances the environment. Even Goya's black paintings are decorative.
He had them installed in his house. In fact, Saturn Devouring His Child
was right up above the dining table. [Laughter]. Can you imagine being
at dinner with Goya, being invited over to dinner at Goya's place?
On the other hand there is Matisse. He aspired to a peaceful painting
that brings comfort. What was the title of that painting? La Luxe, Calm
et La Volupte! The cathartic aspect of painting is not really the image
but the way it's painted, the sensation of the color. Poor Vincent
Van Gogh! He imagined his paintings bringing warmth and hope to sailors
out on a stormy sea, a sense of some kind of safe harbor. He aspired to
a kind of religious art. He had in mind a triptych. The side panels
would be his sunflowers, and the center panel was a woman, La Berceuse,
I think she was called-this very big-breasted maternal woman. A kind
of a Madonna, or an earth goddess, in the middle between the
sunflowers. Last year, I was in New York and there was a Leonardo da
Vinci show at the Met, which was just utterly fascinating. Da Vinci
reminds me of you, Gottfried, in the sense that he presents a seamless
apparition. You almost would have had to have a magnifying glass to
appreciate some of these things. There was a grove of trees about
postage stamp size, but when you look into it, there it is. It's just
chalk and paper - that kind of red chalk that he used. But, there it
is, magically presenting itself to you. Coming out of the da Vinci
show, I found myself just wandering about, almost dazed. Then I found
myself in this room with all these Poussins. My God! It felt like I was
in heaven or something. Because it's a state of feeling. I think in
the course of time, that feeling intensifies, and the paintings have an
evermore magical presence. There is an increasing sense of emotional
belonging, or something like that - in art.
Helnwein:
Great art triggers something - like a long forgotten memory. You have
the feeling there is something so deeply familiar...
When I saw The Night Watch of Rembrandt in the Rijchsmuseum in
Amsterdam long ago, I was in a state of shock. I was completely
overwhelmed. I had tears in my eyes. I was so moved, and I didn't
know why. I could not explain it.
Some guys commissioned Rembrandt to paint them, photography didn't
exist yet so they had to get somebody to paint them - and why would
I, hundreds of years later, care about these mediocre guys in stupid
military costumes?
Why would I be so touched and moved? It doesn't make sense. I have no
explanation, there is no logic reason. The depicted subject obviously
doesn't really matter. It's probably just an excuse to paint.
Morrison:
Yeah.
Helnwein:
Van Gogh used the chair in his room. Some ugly chair. Who cares about
the chair? It shows that you can take basically anything you want, and
then transform it and use as an entrance into a different universe.
Morrison:
Well, Van Gogh's chair, in his mind, there was this strong emotion.
There's his chair and there's his pipe. I think he had a whole kind
of emotional subtext to that chair. But we don't need to know that.
Helnwein:
This emotional aspect transfers so well. I look at it and I am moved. I
don't know what his ideas were about the chair, I don't know the
story of the chair, but I look at it and I am emotionally involved.
Morrison:
Yeah.
Helnwein:
Very often people ask, how did you get this idea? Or what does that
painting mean? Or things like that. I think no painter ever, if he is
honest, could explain, why exactly he is painting something.
When you paint , you don't construct, concoct or fabricate something
cleverly. It's an intuitional process, isn't it?
Morrison:
Of course. It's your instinct. Yeah. There's no formula.
Helnwein:
Right. And that's what people very often don't understand. They
always want you to explain how you got to the thing - what the idea
is behind the painting - and I never know what to say.
Actually I don't care. It's just there.
Van Gogh was a good example of this. He was a guy who clinically would
have been described as an insane person.
Morrison:
Yeah.
Helnwein:
He was finished. He couldn't handle and control his mind and his
thinking anymore. So he turned himself into an insane asylum. He was
desperate. We know that his life was falling apart, but at the same
time, as a painter, he was a genius at the peak of his creation and
completely intact.
So it seems that the mind and thinking is not really essential in the
process of creating.
It's a completely different area or level where that comes from. Van
Gogh got better and better and more intense.
Morrison:
There was this incredible clarity until the end.
Helnwein:
Right. The struggle and the darkness and the anxiety that he had on
this level as a human being, and not being able to handle anything
practically, did not have a negative or hindering effect on his
creation.
Morrison:
Yeah. Well it drove him out there. I think it was just the terrible
fear. I suppose the realization that he was going to somehow lose it
made him end his life. Artaud has this great essay. It's called Van
Gogh The Man: Suicided by Society. The meaning of something in a very
direct way. I remember reading about some Russian stage designer who
made the claim that if you could get good enough, you could put just a
chair on an empty stage, and when the audience saw it, they would all
just burst into tears.
It's a very mysterious thing. But it's very real. And very direct.
Helnwein:
I think it's more real than anything else.
Morrison:
And it is a pure instinct. That last painting of Van Gogh's-or what
people think of as his last painting-The Crows Over the Wheatfield.
In every aspect, there's this incredible clarity and realization.
It's an amazing painting. You've got the blue of the sky and then
the yellow of the wheat. Then this incredible kind of almost bloody,
deep red in the foreground. And there's a path. But uniting it all,
and it's one of the most extraordinary uses of black, is the crows.
They weave the whole thing together. And you feel the whole tumult of
the universe. I think about that all the time, especially when I'm
doing these garden paintings. I want the wind to be blowing through
them and the sense of them being alive, the sense of time passing and
the elements and the light changing and all of that.
Helnwein:
When did you decide to paint your gardens?
Morrison:
Well, I think that it's just something that I came to. I came to a
realization over the course of time that for some reason I was destined
to paint gardens. [Laughter]. I'd done it. For years and years,
I've done watercolors and pastels when I travel. When I mean a
garden, I mean God's garden. Up in the mountain meadows or by the
sea, or wherever. One just happens upon things quite innocently.
Helnwein:
There was a time when you painted only urban scenes, I rermember the
streets of Paris.
Morrison:
I spent some time in Paris in the early seventies. I stayed in this
tiny little apartment with a friend of mine who was a composer. I was
totally fascinated by this area. There was Les Halles, which is kind of
the stomach of Paris. And then the next street over is the Rue St.
Denis where all the prostitutes are. A friend of mine told me later
there had been prostitutes on the Rue St. Denis for over a thousand
years. In fact, there are buildings there that are still used, and
nobody really thinks about it, for over a thousand years. Paris is
quite an ancient city. And you feel that. I used to go around. I was
always fascinated looking at the girls standing in doorways and
everything. Wim invited me over to Paris to be in the film called Until
the End of the World. I painted there. And his place, which was my
studio, was right exactly where I had been in the seventies.
Helnwein:
Oh yeah?
Morrison:
I'd get up every morning before dawn and go out there. It's just an
incredible scene-all the produce coming in, all these farmers and
their wagons, and then all these girls. In fact, I recognized a lot of
them from having been there previously. There were still some of the
same girls operating.
Helnwein:
Really?
Morrison:
Yeah, yeah. Tough old birds.
In fact, there was this tiny little woman, who was almost like that
strange little woman in the Balthus painting that's drawing back the
curtains, who was out there before dawn every morning sweeping the
street. I recognized her from years before and I did a little sketch.
I'd go out on the streets and I'd do little sketches and then I'd
go back. At the time, I was really turned onto ancient Indian sacred
erotic art - The Kama Sutra - those amazing statutes and reliefs
from the temples in India. The girls reminded me of that, the way they
stood. It's like an ancient kind of configuration. In a sense, it
speaks to you in a strange way. You see things that have some kind of a
resonance that summons up a certain kind of feeling. And then you paint
it. You go back all excited with your little sketches.
Helnwein:
That's a painting that made a deep impression on me. I never forgot
it.
Morrison:
I think the first time you came to visit...
Helnwein:
Like you said, that street scene reminds me of Balthus. Your style of
painting is very different, but in a way it's describing a similar
universe.
Morrison:
Oh yeah. Well, it's the same place. When you're there, you can't
help but think of painters. I think of Balthus. But also I think of
writers-Emile Zola. He depicted all these streets.
Helnwein:
It's a timeless magic quality. I know that in certain places you'll
suddenly feel as though there is no time barrier. You connect up to the
people who created, loved and suffered there at earlier times. You can
still feel them when you walk the streets. For me, their presence can
be as real as if they were physically there right now. You feel
connected and touched whether you want to or not. They're there.
They're present.
That's probably the great fascination of mythological cities like
Paris.
Morrison:
Oh yeah. And it's not just the eighteenth century or the nineteenth
century. It's ancient Paris. I had the sensation - it was late at
night, and I was as high as a kite probably, sort of drunk and just
looking at all the people. To me, it was like they were marching
through time, down the ages, all these faces. They're the same people
that walked through these streets a thousand years ago. And I think
it's something that maybe here in America we don't really
appreciate - that sense of continuity. I think we're maybe starting
to appreciate it.
Helnwein:
It's a shorter time frame.
Morrison:
It is.
Helnwein:
That's why it's interesting to look at your American or L.A.
paintings as opposed to the Paris paintings. It's obviously a
different universe. How is it different for you, painting in here as
opposed to Paris, for example? Because in Paris, as you said, you
cannot help but be connected to this ongoing thousand years of history
that's still continuing. But here you don't have that.
Morrison:
Well, you have. It's a very brittle shell here-the surface. I live
around the corner from the La Brea Tar Pits, which is the primordial
ooze in a way. I want to paint them. William Burroughs, when he was in
L.A., he came a few times when he had a big exhibition there. He had
dreams about the Tar Pits, these gigantic centipedes coming up out of
the pits. I don't know. I think Los Angeles is all very new, but at
the same time, you feel South America. You feel not the Latin world but
more the Aztec or Toltec world. It's a whole new place.
Helnwein:
But it were people like Cecile B. DeMille, the Warner Brothers and
others that started to transform this little desert-town into the
mythological center of the 20th century.
Morrison:
Yeah. It's been the dream factory for the world.
Helnwein:
That's probably why it seems much older than it really is. Because in
this very short time, barely a hundred years, so many stories and fairy
tales have been invented and told here. So many worlds and myths
created that, in a way, you feel it is also an ancient place.
Morrison:
That's the strange thing about film, I think - about old film. When
you see Charlie Chaplin or very early films, they start up and it's
kind of like a dream, but the people are real. And yet they're gone.
They're all dead. But here they are alive. This is a kind of
apparition. But they're all gone. I think paintings are different in
the sense that you can have a painting from thousands of years ago and
yet it's very much still there. You look at a Caravaggio and it's
happening - this big tableau of figures. You look at an old film. You
sit there and you're taken into a world. It's not that long ago,
maybe half a century or whatever. But you're transported into another
time.
Helnwein:
That's right. In actual time it's a very short period. But for all
of us it's history.
Morrison:
That's something about your work I think.
Helnwein:
I think that at different times we had different centers for the
spirtual and the magic in the world. Once it was Luxor, Athens, Delphi,
then Rome, later Paris and so on. You always have these places.
In the twentieth century, it really was Hollywood.
The way we imagine, think and dream is deeply inspired, and influenced
by it.
But it's interesting that people actually think, generally speaking,
not very highly of L.A. it's concidered the capital for cheap and
stupid entertainment - not art.
Morrison:
All of it's superficial, kind of flashy.
Helnwein:
But that misses the point. I think L.A. is really a mythical place.
It's amazing how it changed the way the whole world - not only the
Western world - sees reality. It transformed reality.
Morrison:
Yeah. Well, there's a whole new kind of horizon. There's a new
frontier.
But it's also spiritual and kind of a psychic frontier.
Helnwein:
It seems nobody took this little desert town seriously. Nobody tried to
limit or stop anything and dreaming was still legal here.
Maybe that's why all this creative people ended up here.
In Germany in the twenties and thirties there were great filmmakers
like Fritz Lange and others, but the Nazis took over and in their
empire there was no place for art.
I think rulers are always worried by artists and their creations. They
sense that art is a potential danger to their power.
I think dictators understand more than any others, how powerful and
dangerous art can be. That's why Stalin - the most powerful man on
earth at his time - was so scared by poets.
He had a problem for example with a woman named Akhmatova, who wrote
little poems.
The guy had ten million soldiers and the biggest and most sophisticated
network of secret police. But he was scared by painters and poets and
and he took personally care that their works could not be exhibited,
their books could not be printed and their plays could not be
performed, and that artist went to Gulags or commited suicide.
The same with Hitler. Modern Art put him in a rage - he completely
freaked out. He burned mountains of books, he looted the museums and
destroyed thousands of paintings, especially the paintings we're
talking about.
And he created the so-called "Reichskulturkammer" a goverment office,
that had the power to decide if somebody was allowed to paint or write.
Whithout the document that gave you the permission to do so, creating
was illegal.
He invented the term "degenerate art". And what he meant was art
- because everything that he described as "degenerate art" was just
art.
Morrison:
Yes, well, it was the most vital art. The most exciting art.
Helnwein:
Sometimes I get asked: "Do you really think art can change
anything?"
People often underestimate the power of art and think it's just
decoration or investment for the rich.
But dictators know of the potential of art.
Morrison:
The power of an image.
Helnwein:
Or the power of a tune. I think Queen Elisabeth said once something
like: "If we really want to defeat the Irish, we would have to break
their harps".
So I think when Germany really came down hard on its artists and
stopped the creation, they had to leave. And where could they go? They
ended up here in California in the middle of the desert where it was
safe.
That's where Fritz Lange came and Marlene Dietrich and this boy from
Vienna named Samuel Wilder who later became Billy Wilder, and Max
Beckmann, Bert Brecht, Max Reinhard, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger,
Walter Gropius, Thomas Mann and so many others that had to leave
Germany.
Morrison:
When I first came to L.A., I really wanted to paint L.A. - swimming
pools and everything. You see them when you're flying in. It's kind
of exciting. I lived out in the Valley. For a couple of years, I lived
out near Topanga. I started painting from the model out there. In the
neighbor's swimming pool I spent this kind of idyllic summer painting
this girl in the water. At the time, it was just the excitement of, in
real life, that kind of mythic color that you'd seen in the movies
- that color of the swimming pool. That amazing kind of bright -
what is the color? A kind of aquamarine or whatever it is. And then the
suntanned, orange beautiful flesh and the sun and flowers and the whole
thing. I didn't think too much about it. The swimming pool in a way
is almost Baconesque in it being a kind of a configuration, a kind of a
geometric, almost like a stage, something that delineates space. And to
put the figure in is very exciting. Recently I've been doing these
gardens. I began to think, well, I want to work the figure back into
it. I began to think of the gardens. I'm painting gardens; I'm
painting flowers and so forth. But when you're out there everyday,
you begin to think of the gardens in some kind of mythological sense.
The hanging gardens of Babylon. The Garden of Eden. The garden of
earthly delight. Hassan Issaba in the garden of earthly delight sending
out his assassins. But also kind of ancient mythology like Diana the
Huntress, Diana and Action. Action seeing Diana bathing, gazing upon
her beautiful flesh and all that, and the terrible consequences of it.
And I started thinking in some kind of mythological kind of subtext. I
think it's always there with a painter. You might be just simply
there painting a figure and it might be just simply that. But somehow,
subconsciously or consciously, it seeps into one's consciousness,
seeps up eventually - some kind of mythological underpinning or
subtext that inspires you. It gives it a meaning. So it becomes like a
pictogram. Something that tells a story.
Helnwein:
The same archetype story that has inspired so many other artists
before.
Morrison:
It's the same story. The figure in nature. But it could be like babes
in the woods. Hansel and Gretel. Or it could be Venus. Or it could be
the Blessed Virgin appearing at Lourdes.
Helnwein:
Looking at your girls in the garden, you can't help but think of all
these other paintings of beautiful girls in gardens before - Susanna
and the elders...
Morrison:
Susanna and the elders, yeah.
Helnwein:
Everything is so tempting. She is tempting, but so are the flowers.
Morrison:
Ulysses looking at the sirens, tied to the mast. It's kind of
dangerous and it's intimate. But it's primordial and it goes way
back into the depths of one's youth as well.
Actually it's kind of funny. I think I've told you this before. I
found your painting of Leda and the Swan, Donald Duck, amused me. But
at the same time, Donald Duck could be an incarnation of Zeus. And I
thought to myself, well, a coconut tree or a giant bird of paradise
could be an incarnation of Zeus.
Helnwein:
In old mythology a god could turn into a tree or a swan or anything. We
didn't have these limitations and fixed distinctions of species then.
Morrison:
God resided everywhere.
Even in rocks. Growing up in Ireland, ancient mythology and Catholicism
and even modern Irish history all become one in a sense.
Helnwein:
It all started with a pantheistic vision.
Later religions and philosophies tried to get rid of that concept,
- but I think as an artist you always end up going back to that. You
can't help it.
Through art you realize and experience that everything is alive,
anything at all - Even so-called dead things.
Morrison:
It's within you. And there are certain moments when you feel it. It
rises up from within your consciousness.
Helnwein:
That's what I feel with your gardens - that every flower and every
tree has a personality, and in every bush there lurks some god or
demon.
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