"The Child", works by Gottfried Helnwein
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Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Palace of the Legion of Honor
Robert Flynn Johnson
Curator in Charge
THE CHILD
Works by Gottfried Helnwein
..A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's
art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject
matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it
included self-portraits, is dominated by the image of the child, but
not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein
instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative
image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child
scarred emotionally from within.
.
"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot, which the poet spends his
life patiently trying to untie."
Jean Cocteau
After World War Two, the tear glands of the world dried up from
over-use. It is this world for which Warhol is spokesman.
Lucy R. Lippard, 1966The art of Gottfried Helnwein cannot be properly
considered without surveying the terrain of modern and contemporary art
from which it developed. To understand Helnwein is not just to see what
movements and artists he embraced and was influenced by, but also what
he rejected. For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but a mission.
His art is the visual equivalent of a contact sport. It not only has
put Helnwein at odds with much of the history of post-war art, but also
has positioned him in the forefront of the highly regarded
confrontationalist movements of contemporary art so active in America
and Europe today.
It is startling and disturbing to reflect that if one walks through the
galleries of major museums exhibiting art of the fifties, sixties,
seventies, and even into the eighties, there is a virtual dearth of art
whose subject matter involves an emotional response to the human
condition or which comments on the major social issues of the day. For
those major painters and sculptors it is as if the Holocaust, the
Vietnam War, the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights
movements did not exist. It is not that one would expect many to choose
such subjects, but that virtually none did is noteworthy.
Of course, there were a number of artists who continued the crusade
(which reached its peak in the 1930s) to use art as a weapon of social
activism. Artists like Stanley Spencer, Ben Shahn, and Leon Golub
created provocative work, but they were seen as peripheral to the
avant-garde by critics, collectors and museums alike.
Europe, the scene of so much destruction and displacement during the
century, had a greater number of artists attuned to human values in
their art than America. In France, Picasso continued to utilize his
canvas to mirror his psyche and libido to the world. However, as
passionate as he was, Picasso rarely allowed his art to go beyond his
own life as he did in the earlier monumental paintings, Guerinica
(1937) and The Charnel House (1945). The Swiss-born Alberto Giacommetti
created stark and unnerving images of man in his sculptures and
paintings. Jean Dubuffet drew as much inspiration from the art of the
insane as real life in his contorted comic personages. Germany and
Austria in this period, however, were marked by suppression, not
expression in their art. Mannerists such as Paul Wunderlich and Ernst
Fuchs were in vogue, but only the seemingly random photorealism of
Gerhard Richter and Franz Gertsch and the tormented expressionism of
Anselm Kiefer and Horst Janssen struck a truthful note.
One oasis of creativity during this period, where deeply expressed
ideas about the nature of man existed, was London. Francis Bacon and
Lucian Freud were at the forefront of a group of artists that
eventually included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews,
Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, David Hockney, and the expatriate
American R. B. Kitaj.
In America, several popular artists made the odd detour into this area
of expression. Examples would be James Rosenquist's painting F-111
(1969), Claus Oldenberg's sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) On
Caterpillar Tracks (1969), and Roy Lichtenstein's romance comic
paintings such as Drowning Girl (1963), which contain more parody than
pathos. The two American artists who most often utilized the headlines
of the day were Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Concerning
Rauschenberg, the potentially volatile use of photographic images such
as President Kennedy and NASA rockets was defused by their use for
purely aesthetic purposes. There is a skillful seductive look, but no
discernible message beneath the virtuoso surface except that raw media
can become high art
Andy Warhol's images strike a deeper chord. Warhol realized that for
his generation (and generations to come?) the purpose of art was to
replace the symbols of an earlier devout and unchallenging age (Christ,
the Virgin Mary, kings, queens, and political leaders) with the
practical and popular replacements of a shallower era (Brando, Monroe,
and other celebrities). Warhol's genius lay in his making a physical
reality out of a phenomenon that was already uneasily entering our
consciousness before his first silkscreen paintings ever existed; the
notion that nothing was sacred or profane anymore. Anything or anybody
could and would become art. Whim was more useful to Warhol than values.
In retrospect, the banality and irony of his vision made him the most
brilliant, yet soulless, artist of his era.
Grainy newspaper wire photos were the raw material of Warhol's
vision. His subjects included plane and automobile crashes, wanted
criminals, electric chairs, race riots, Jacqueline Kennedy in mourning,
and women who died from consuming tainted tuna fish. The one thing,
however, that is consistent in all these works is that Warhol professed
no feelings one way or the other about the subjects at hand. These
potentially "hot" subjects have been desensitized of their pathos.
The bleached-out photo imagery screened onto seemingly random colored
backgrounds evoke neither approval nor dissent by Warhol. They are
provocative simply by existing as works of art.
An artist who seriously treated portraiture as the focus of his art was
Chuck Close. From the end of the sixties until today, despite having
had to overcome the effects of a stroke, Close has concentrated on the
human face. As astounding as these works are, evolving through a series
of virtuoso styles, there is a strangely unmoving quality about them.
Something with the potential to engage the viewer in human terms ends
up conveying the impersonal identification of a drivers' license
photo.
The overly intellectual and formal aspects of most painting and
sculpture from the 1950s until the beginning of the 1980s was not
shared in other areas of culture. One need only mention, for example,
the names of Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus in
photography; Roberto Rosselini, Elia Kazan, and Michaelangelo Antononi
in cinema; Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Printer in
theatre and James Baldwin, Günter Grass, and John Updike in
literature, who embraced and made the turmoil of human existence a
focal point of their art.
Something was brewing among visual artists that began in the sixties,
took hold during the 1970s, and only became a vital aspect of the
avant-garde in the 1980s. Theory design, and decoration were no longer
enough. Artists had to break out of the supplicant to patron mode. The
artist's feelings became more important than the collector's
appetite. The result carried on by artists of widely diverse styles
contained a pent up angry "nothing to lose" attitude. The past, the
present, the future, sex, death, gender, politics, and religion were
all worthy of artistic scrutiny. The desire for individualism and
self-examination in art that flickered to life in the late sixties had
become a full-blown prairie fire of emotionally charged art in the
nineties. The career and the art of Gottfried Helnwein parallels this
course in the history of contemporary art.
"I made a promise to myself to remember everything I saw; if someone
should pluck out my eyes, then I would retain the memory of all that I
had seen for as long as I lived."
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird
Artists are the visual, verbal, and audio guardians of our collective
consciousness. For example, few can remember the politics or history of
18th century Europe, but the music of Mozart and the paintings of
Watteau continue to be a source of inspiration. We might not always
like the message, but it is artists that distill the essence of an era.
They serve as thoughtful messengers to a sometimes unperceptive
present, but often receptive future.
In 1948 Gottfried Helnwein was born in Austria, a country that
willingly had embraced Nazi Germany. For decades after its defeat, the
Austrian population could not come to terms with the evil with which it
had associated. The fervent acceptance of the Anschluss was replaced by
a sense of wounded denial in the years after the war. It was in this
dysfunctional society that Helnwein spent his youth. Helnwein wrote of
this time.
"My childhood was a horror-born right after the war, I lived in a
world of depression and unlimited boredom. All the grown-ups looked
ugly and devastated. I never saw anybody laughing and I never heard
anybody sing. I always felt I have landed in limbo. A two-dimensional
world without colors, my real life began when I got my first Mickey
Mouse comic book from the Americans-when I opened a three-dimensional
world full of colors and wonders. My first encounter with art was
totally opposed to the torture art of the church. Very early I started
to research. I knew something had happened, but all the adults were
unable to talk about it. Nobody wanted to answer my questions. But I
found out what I wanted to know and I'm still finding out."
Gottfried Helnwein is an intelligent individual whose art is
influenced, but not overwhelmed, by his awareness of history, culture,
and politics. As a young man, his artistic energy needed to be
encouraged, channeled and refined. In 1969, with the support of the
artist Rudolf Hausner, Helnwein was admitted to the Vienna Academy of
Art, the crucible of creativity in Vienna since the days of Gustave
Klimt and Egon Schiele. The four years that Helnwein spent there were
not for instruction, for he required and received little. It was for
the structure and the process. To work within one of the great
ateliers, to interact with fellow artists, and to see art as a vehicle
for expression to a wider audience.
Helnwein wrote of this period: "When I started to paint in the first
years, I did not want to know anything about High Art and the art
world. Different from most artists I knew, for me it was never a matter
of decoration, style, or art reflecting and dealing with the problems
of art. It was the politics, society, history, media, news, that
provoked, shocked and motivated me and the so-called trivial world of
comics, advertising, and Rock and Roll. Art, for me, was not only a way
to explore the subject matter of war, violence, and society, but also a
way to fight back-a way of resistance-of not agreeing with what an
oppressive, manipulating ruling society is trying to force on us. I
felt I could strike back with my pictures and force people to look at
things they'd rather forget."
It was during this period that Helnwein expanded his creative
imagination into the areas he is best known for today. The art of
drawing and painting was, and is. the bedrock of his art. However,
Helnwein did not want to be confined or categorized, and felt free also
to involve himself in photography. Further, he wanted to take his art
out into the streets, to confront the world with his images and ideas.
This form of art, now generally referred to as performance art, was
called "Aktions." In America, in the early sixties, it was called
"Happenings," but their true origin goes back to the early days of
the Dada movement in Switzerland, France, and Germany. Each of these
different artistic enthusiasms informed his art. A photograph would
inspire a watercolor. A painting would inspire an Aktion. Helnwein
wrote of this period, "In the beginning I was almost autistic.... I
didn't know about Richter, Schwarzkogler, the Wiener Aktionism, and
all other works. Much later, in the early eighties, I started to
research and I was amazed to see how many connections and similarities
I found with other artists' works which emerged at approximately the
same time. However, there was no direct inspiration or influence.
A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's
art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject
matter was the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it
included self-portraits, was dominated by the image of the child, but
not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein
instead created the profoundly disturbing, yet compellingly provocative
image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child
scarred emotionally from within.
In art history, before the end of the eighteenth century, the child as
an independent subject matter hardly existed. The child usually
appeared symbolically or allegorically as cupid, putti, or an angel.
The child also appeared as a miniature adult as in the depiction of
young gods, kings, or, in Christianity, Jesus. This, however was to
change with the advent of the Romantic movement in Europe. Around 1800,
artists, such as William Blake, Louis Leopold Boilly, and Phillip Otto
Runge, began to have children appear as individuals in their works,
disconnected from their previous symbolic baggage. The image of this
now liberated child was one that promised innocence, freedom, and
curiosity. However, now made mortal, there was also the necessary
introduction of emotions, sexuality, and the prospect of pain,
suffering, and death.
There are a number of these earlier artists who were especially
meaningful to Helnwein in their portrayal of children. Among them were
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) with his adoration of feminine
adolescence; Edvard Munch and his depiction of suffering and sexual
awakening; and Balthus with his preoccupation with secrets and the
erotic.
The children in these works have a knowing look in their eyes. There
was a sense of life experienced, both good and bad, which made these
works so intense and, in their own day, so controversial. It was
apparent from the reception that these artists and others received,
however, that any derivation from the most bland representation of
children as innocents was cause for violent backlash from society. The
public was then, as it is now, very uncomfortable about showing the
child as having a sexual identity, however subtle, or suffering in any
way, whether physically or emotionally. Artists like Munch were willing
to risk the wrath of propriety in seeking out this unexplored area of
human experience. For Gottfried Helnwein, it became the major theme of
his career.
How can a friendly person like Helnwein stand making
his-excellent-painting into a mirror of the terrors of this
century? Or is it that he can't stand not doing it? Does his mirror
just reflect the attitude of the century?Heiner Müller Looming out
across a Helnwein canvas over twelve feet in length, Mickey Mouse,
1995, stares back at us. He is, at once, both benignly sweet and
threateningly sinister depending on your age and viewpoint. Helnwein
has written. "What do I associate with the name Disney? The inspiring
sacred comics of my childhood that gave me a chance to escape from the
cold Nazi country into a world of joy and wonder, or Michael Eisner's
multi-billion dollar machine that smothers the world." The truth is,
this image could represent both viewpoints, just one, or neither. As
Pablo Picasso once remarked, "A picture lives a life like a living
creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to
day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man
who is looking at it."
A flag painting by Jasper Johns is neither pattern nor patriotic. It is
both a beautiful act of pure painting, but also an image pregnant with
meaning because of the symbolic nature of the subject matter. This is
also true with Helnwein's painting. Often overlooked in the discourse
over the subject matter or meaning of Helnwein's art is the
appreciation of the compositional and painterly beauty of his work. The
technical virtuosity of art makes acceptable certain images that more
crudely executed by others would be unbearable. Mickey Mouse hovers
between carefree and carnivorous in our consciousness. It is the unease
of our age that Helnwein has seized upon.
Sunday's Child, 1972 is a disturbing tour de force of the young
Helnwein. It is a multi-layered vision convincing in its hyper-realism
(notice the beautifully rendered reflections of the apartment buildings
in the window) at odds with the absurdist fantasy of a knapsack toting
duck with a popsicle. Between these two competing tendencies appears an
adolescent girl, the true subject of the picture. She stands in winter
coat and mittens in front of the glass doors of a store festooned with
the advertisements of mass consumerism. On her arm is a cloth armband
signifying that she is blind, although it is clear that she is not. In
her hand is a large chocolate bar. Blood runs down her legs, staining
her thighs. Is she bleeding from early menstruation or the result of a
sexual encounter (rape?) of which the chocolate is her reward or to buy
her silence? Her face is a contradiction. She sticks her tongue out to
the viewer with a smirk. Is it an innocent expression or a lascivious
gesture?
Helnwein makes our mind swoon between the simply bizarre and the truly
perverse. What holds this outrageous work together is the painstaking
detail of his watercolor rendering and the baffling mystery of what it
represents. Like many of Helnwein's best works, it is a drama without
narrative. Despite all its visual information, it only raises
questions, not answers them.
Tennessee Williams once said that all good art was an indiscretion. In
Helnwein's case, it is a confrontation. Since his earliest work,
Helnwein has linked children and pain. The wounded child has become his
metaphor for the chaos of our emotionally vacant world.
The writer Peter Gorsen wrote of Helnwein's work, "The child is the
embodiment of the innocent, defenseless, sacrificed individual at the
mercy of brute force. As an innocent, child of light, whose head and
hand injuries emit light rays like self-radiating stigmata, he is
heroized into a sufferer and a savior figure." The wounds of Christ
and the martyrdom of saints, so often depicted in countless paintings,
sculptures, and car dashboard shrines, no longer have the power to
shock. Despite our general indifference to general suffering in the
world, the thought, or better yet, the image of a child in pain still
gets though the emotional defense mechanisms to our feelings. Helnwein
understands this and exploits this knowledge in his art.
Beautiful Victim I, 1974 was inspired by a 1972 altered photograph
Child of Light II, which was carefully arranged and posed by the
artist. The magic of this watercolor lies in its balancing of beauty
and horror. The work itself is subtle in color with exquisite
Vermeer-like light bathing the exquisitely rendered outstretched body
of the young girl. Contradicting the peace is the shocking bandages and
tubes that surround and obscure the child's face. We are repelled and
entranced at the same time. There is no explanation for her wounds, no
explanation for what she is doing on the floor. Helnwein's aim is not
to tell a story, but to trigger a response.
Helnwein has always been interested in photography as both a catalyst
in his painting and an end in itself. He has written, "I think
photography is the key medium for all artists who work in some kind of
realistic manner. People today perceive and know the world mainly
through two-dimensional reproductions and film. It's a highly
manipulative media. and I'm fascinated by its almost unlimited
possibilities to shift and twist the reality. When it looks like a
photograph people think it's real. So I always had the feeling a very
photographical image has more impact, more suggestive power."
Helnwein has increasingly preferred to paint in grisaille (monochrome)
utilizing a deep blue-black. (Another contemporary artist who employs
this method is Mark Tansey, who usually opts for a brick red tonality
in his works.) For Helnwein, the restriction of color to a single tone
removes extraneous visual distractions and focuses attention on the
subject at hand. It also links his paintings with photographic sources
in an interesting way. A black and white photograph is both extremely
real in its technical ability to capture a moment in time and, at the
same time, completely false in that we do not live in a world purged of
color. In his monochrome paintings, Helnwein has taken advantage of our
mind's photographic experience and expectations to create paintings
that have the same degree of reality/falsehood.
The subject matter of Night IV, ca. 1990, is both autobiographical and
symbolic. Helnwein uses the comic book as a symbol of freedom. As a
child he sought refuge in the escapist fantasy these comics delivered.
Here this refuge, although in the possession of the child, is denied.
Because of her bandages, her hands cannot turn the pages and her eyes
cannot see. The starkness of the child's world is in contrast to the
inviting color and energy that the comic book promises. The child also
sits in a darkened room with only the glow of a television screen for
illumination. The medium of television has the potential of imparting
information, news, history, and entertainment. All too often, however,
it serves as a visual narcotic and time waster in our society,
providing the lowest common denominator of content. Helnwein is all too
aware of this as he depicts this blinded child helplessly turned to the
screen.
We live in an age of euphemisms to cocoon ourselves from getting too
close to the truth. Bombs that kill civilians do not inflict
casualties, but only cause "collateral damage." The greatest cause
of unnatural disaster to humanity over the centuries has not been the
result of economic or nationalistic forces, but the inhumanity
unleashed by organized religion on one group by another. The use of
brutality under the banner of religion is a profound perversion of
anything sacred. Untitled (after Andrea Mantegna), 1993 is Helnwein's
response to the ethnic horrors unleashed in the Balkans since the
dissolution of Yugoslavia. Based on a painting by the Italian
Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Helnwein has
painstakingly replicated the composition in monochrome, except for one
telling detail. In the case of the Christ Child, he has depicted the
face as terribly disfigured and maimed. Helnwein is symbolically
confronting the hypocrisy of Christian Serbs who, while conducting
their reign of terror and murder, under the euphemism of "ethnic
cleansing," maintained that they were defending Christianity against
the inroads of the Moslems. It is history repeating itself, and
Helnwein utilizes history to comment on the latest failure of
civilization to be civilized.
"Anyone who sees and paints the sky green and pastures blue ought to be
sterilized."
Adolf Hitler
This single sentence sums up the essence of the totalitarian mindset.
The world must adhere to an order of which no variation or independence
is acceptable. Epiphany I, 1996 is from an important series of three
paintings created over a three-year period. This seamless stapling of a
version of the Adoration of the Magi into a scenario out of the Third
Reich is in keeping with Helnwein's desire to press the limits.
Helnwein wrote, "In the Epiphany trilogy, I refer directly to my
(our) own historical background. The most significant issue on the time
track of the occident is Christianity and the male dominated world of
conquering and oppression. The constant slaughter of the
"weak"-women, children, the Jews, and other ethnic minorities,
through holy wars, crusades, and the constant extermination of the
inferior." The apparent blasphemy of this scene of Nazi evil
encountering the Madonna and Child is not so clear cut in Helnwein's
mind. It is a more symbolic case of unconditional evil (the Third
Reich) meeting conditional evil (the Catholic Church), It takes on a
further significance with the knowledge of the complicity of Pope Pius
XII, in matters of moral responsibility, with Germany during World War
II. The surreal atmosphere within the picture is attributable to
Helnwein creating the veracity of a carefully composed news photo
within a traditional Renaissance composition.
"There is a basic misconception that any given face at any given time
looks more or less the same: like a statue's face. Actually, the
human face is as variable from moment to moment as a screen on which
images are reflected. . . .Gottfried Helnwein's paintings and
photographs attack this misconception showing the variety of faces of
which any face is capable."
William S. Burroughs
For Helnwein, the nature of portraiture is not the mere artistic
replication of physiognomy or capturing the essence of a person's
character. It is more complex than that. Helnwein, like many other
artists today, such as Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, Christian Boltanski,
Fang Lijun, and Ron Mueck have shattered the traditional sense of
identity through formal portraiture and reassembled the concept in a
multitude of different styles and concepts.
In many of Helnwein's works, what at first glance appears to be the
portrait of an individual, in truth, comes to be seen as a more
generalized conception. This is true in Untitled, 1994. The immediate
reaction to the work is one of mystery. Is the fragmentary depiction of
the child's face simply caused by shadow, or is there no illusion? Is
the face a fragment like some broken Egyptian sculpture in the British
Museum? Is the child depicted asleep, as our subconscious hopes, or
dead as our subconscious fears? Restricting the tonalities to a
blue-black pallor reinforces a mood of solemnity. Helnwein gives us
enough information to care, but not enough information to know.
Not content with a consistent artistic viewpoint, Helnwein creates a
very different dynamic in Head of a Child V, 1998. At first glance,
Helnwein has created a more straightforward portrait. It is in
naturalistic color executed with photorealist precision. It is not a
generalized conception, but the specific portrait of a beautiful young
girl with blond hair and blue eyes. The work has a luminosity inspired
by the paintings of Georges de la Tour and Caravaggio.
Beyond the general attractiveness of the subject and the virtuosity of
the execution of the work, what makes us care? There is a quiet drama
going on in this painting. Her face comes out of darkness and is
starkly and artificially lit. Her face is partially in darkness, one
eye in the shadow, the other distinct and staring from the center of
the canvas. It is an unnerving picture. Although the girl displays no
distinct emotion, one has a sense of unspoken dialogue between subject
and viewer. There is knowledge, and one could even project a subtle
judgmental quality to her stare. It is as if a youth were to say to an
adult, "How could you have screwed the world up so badly?"
Ultimately, Helnwein's portraits follow what Oscar Wilde perceptively
observed, "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait
of the artist, not of the sitter."
"I cannot bear the crying of children, but when my child cries I
don't hear."
Anton Chechov
Surprisingly, the works of Gottfried Helnwein have something in common
with the art of Alfred Hitchcock. Both often deal in suspense and
mystery. Both often deal with violence or the threat of violence. What
is also true, however, is that both deal in scenes leading up to
violence or the aftermath of violence, but rarely the act of violence
themselves. Like Hitchcock, Helnwein, was well aware that stimulating
the imagination of a viewer can create far greater drama than a literal
depiction.
In Untitled, 1998, Helnwein has presented us with an effect without
knowledge of the cause. In his characteristic monochrome, Helnwein has
a young girl, naked except for a pair of panties, kneeling upon a floor
within a bare room. Her head is obscured by her hands that cover her
face in an implied gesture of grief, pain, or shame. The only other
piece of visual information in the work is a pail to the right of the
girl. Does the pail indicate a task forced upon the child à la
Cinderella? The image is haunting, the emotion of the child is
undeniable, yet the viewer is left to come to his or her own internal
conclusions.
iewing Kiss I, 1998 is like visually eavesdropping on a potentially
explosive situation . . . or is it? Starkly lit within a dark
background, an adolescent girl in a blue dress stares out a us as a
woman, naked from the waist up, holds the girl as she kisses her. Is
this the prelude to a sexual assault? The erotic nature of the
woman's nakedness, the seemingly suggestive lifting of the girl's
dress by the woman's right hand, and the limp response of the girl to
the kiss imply the worst. But wait, could this not just be an act of
tenderness by a young mother to her daughter, and the look of the child
the natural aversion of adolescents to acts of affection? There is no
answer from Helnwein. For the answer, the viewer must look within
himself or herself.There are three things that cannot be seen, even
though they may be right in front of our eyes: the sun, genitals, and
death.
Georges BatailleUntil recently, Helnwein has restricted himself to
dealing with the child as victim, wounded physically or mentally by a
world it cannot comprehend or control. Implicit in these works is that
which logically follows suffering and pain in the extreme is death.
However, the subject of death has rarely appeared in Helnwein's work
until now. In the summer of 1999, Helnwein was commissioned to do a
major installation for the Dominickanerkirche in Krems, Austria. The
installation, entitled Apokalypse was visual assault on the senses and
the emotions. Besides the three large canvases of the Epiphany Cycle,
1996-98 and the painting Late Regret, 1997, Helnwein created four new
series for this installation. The series Angels Burning depicts, in
garish color, the faces of children as if severely burned. Saints
Silent, also in color depicts portraits of men grotesquely disfigured
as if from war wounds. Salved is a series, in monochromatic blue, of
men and boys both burned and disfigured. The final most monumental and
clearly disquieting of the series is Angels Sleeping, a group of
photographs with painted additions. The subject of these are fetuses
floating in a stillborn liquid atmosphere from which they will never
emerge.
Angel Sleeping V, 1999 was part of the installation and representative
of the whole. It is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. This is not an
image from which one can get an intellectual distance, such as Damien
Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone
Living that placed a shark in formaldehyde. Helnwein's work is an
image that was the beginning of a human being, an individual with the
prospects of feelings, aspirations, a future . . . now lost. In
today's contemporary art, it carries a more pessimistic tone than the
oversized infant sculptures of the British artist Ron Mueck, but is
less cynical than Marcus Harvey's portrait of child murderer Myra
Hindley, made up of what appears to be the imprints of children's
hands. It is worth noting that this work would surely be interpreted
differently in the United States than in Europe. For Americans, the
image of a stillborn infant would be seen as a symbol of the debate
over the abortion issue . . . the right to life movement versus a
woman's right to choose. The potential for polarization is far from
the sense of universality that Helnwein intended with his work.
If Gottfried Helnwein were simply the skillful renderer of facile
paintings, drawings, and photographs without meaningful content (like
so many practitioners today) his art would not be of significance. If,
in turn, Helnwein were an artist bursting with original and provocative
ideas without the skills to render those ideas into meaningful art
(also quite common in today's art world), he would not merit the
attention he deserves.
The fact, however, is that Gottfried Helnwein is the genuine article; a
skilled artist with a constantly evolving conscience that seeks release
through his art. A character in the 1976 film Network tells a vast
television audience to go to the window, open it up and shout, "I'm
mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Gottfried
Helnwein shouts with his paintbrush.
Robert Flynn Johnson
Curator-in-Charge
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco