Gottfried Helnwein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gottfried Helnwein (born October 8, 1948 in Vienna) is an
Austrian-Irish fine artist, painter, photographer, installation and
performance artist.
Helnwein
studied at the University of Visual Art in Vienna (German: Akademie
der Bildenden Künste, Wien). He was awarded the Master-class prize
(Meisterschulpreis) of the University of Visual Art, Vienna, the
Kardinal-König prize and the Theodor-Körner prize.
He has worked
as a painter, draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor,
installation- and performance artist, using a wide variety of
techniques and media.
His early work
consists mainly of hyper-realistic watercolors, depicting wounded
children, as well as performances - often with children - in public
spaces. Helnwein is concerned primarily with psychological and
sociological anxiety, historical issues and political topics. As a
result of this, his work is often considered provocative and
controversial.
Viennese-born
Helnwein is part of a tradition going back to the 18th century, to
which Messerschmidt's grimacing sculptures belong. One sees, too,
the common ground of his works with those of Hermann Nitsch and
Rudolf Schwarzkogler, two other Viennese, who display their own
bodies in the frame of reference of injury, pain, and death. One can
also see this fascination for body language goes back to the
expressive gesture in the work of Egon Schiele.
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.
In 2004 The Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco organized the first one-person exhibition
of Gottfried Helnwein at an American Museum: "The Child, works by
Gottfried Helnwein" at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.
The show was seen by almost 130,000 visitors and the San Francisco
Chronicle quoted it the most important exhibition of a contemporary
artist in 2004. Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic,
wrote: "Helnwein's large format, photo-realist images of children of
various demeanors boldly probed the subconscious. Innocence,
sexuality, victimization and haunting self-possession surge and
flicker in Helnwein's unnerving work".
Harry S.Parker III, Director
of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco explained what makes
Helnwein’s art significant: "For Helnwein, the child is the symbol
of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the
malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the
numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of
children. Robert Flynn Johnson, the curator in charge, has assembled
a thought-provoking selection of Helnwein’s works and provided an
insightful essay on his art. Helnwein’s work concerning the child
includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from
subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality. Of course,
brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been
important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What
makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect
emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he
chooses. Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which
to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the
world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of
museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public. The Child:
Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is
also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the
responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with
important and sometimes controversial topics in our society".
Another strong element in
his work are comics. Helnwein has sensed the superiority of cartoon
life over real life ever since he was a child. A magazine interview
brought out an explanation of his obsession with Disney characters.
Growing up in dreary, destructed post-war Vienna, the young boy was
surrounded by unsmiling people haunted by a recent past they could
never speak about. What changed his life was the first
German-language Donald Duck comic book that his father brought home
one day. Opening the book felt like finally arriving in a world
where he belonged:
"...a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and
perforated by bullets without serious harm. A world in which the
people still looked proper, with yellow beaks or black knobs instead
of noses."
In 2000 the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art presented Helnwein's painting "Mouse I" (1995,
oil and acrylic on canvas, 210 cm x 310 cm) at the exhibition The
Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan
Collection.
Alicia Miller commented on Helnwein's work in Artweek: "In 'The
Darker Side of Playland', the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and
cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous. Much of the work
has the quality of childhood nightmares. In those dreams, long
before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that
live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a
child's world are rent with something untoward. For children, not
understanding what really to be afraid of, these dreams portend some
pain and disturbance lurking into the landscape. Perhaps nothing in
the exhibition exemplifies this better than Gottfried Helnwein's
'Mickey'. His portrait of Disney's favorite mouse occupies an entire
wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty,
ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious. His broad
smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer.
This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde, his hidden other self now disturbingly
revealed. Helnwein's Mickey is painted in shades of gray, as if
pictured on an old black-and-white TV set. We are meant to be
transported to the flickering edges of our own childhood memories in
a time imaginably more blameless, crime-less and guiltless. But
Mickey's terrifying demeanor hints of things to come..."
Although Helnwein's work is
rooted in the legacy of German expressionism, he has absorbed
elements of American pop culture. In the 70s he began to include
cartoon characters in his paintings. In several interviews he
claimed: "I learned more from Donald Duck than from all the schools
that I have ever attended." Commenting on that aspect in Helnwein's
work, Julia Pascal wrote in the New Statesman: "His early watercolor
Peinlich (Embarrassing) shows a typical little 1950s girl in a pink
dress and carrying a comic book. Her innocent appeal is destroyed by
the gash deforming her cheek and lips. It is as if Donald Duck had
met Mengele".
Living between Los Angeles
and Ireland, Helnwein met and photographed the Rolling Stones in
London, and his portrait of John F Kennedy made the front cover of
Time magazine on the 20th anniversary of the president's
assassination. His Self-portrait as screaming bandaged man, blinded
by forks (1982) became the cover of the Scorpions album Blackout.
Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali, William Burroughs[12]and the German
industrial metal band Rammstein posed for him; some of his art-works
appeared in the cover-booklet of Michael Jackson's History album.
Referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall Helnwein created the book
Some Facts about Myself, together with Marlene Dietrich. In 2003 he
became friends with Marilyn Manson and started a collaboration with
him on the multi-media art-project The Golden Age of Grotesque and
on several experimental video-projects. Among his widely published
works is a spoof of the famous Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks,
entitled Boulevard of Broken Dreams. This painting also inspired the
Green Day song of the same name.
Examining his imagery from
the 1970s to the present, one sees influences as diverse as Bosch,
Goya, John Heartfield, Beuys and Mickey Mouse, all filtered through
a postwar Viennese childhood.
"God of the Sub-humans"
(detail, self-portrait, right panel of the Triptych), Gottfried
Helnwein, 1986, Photography, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, Collection
Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren'Helnwein’s oeuvre embraces total
antipodes: The trivial alternates with visions of spiritual doom,
the divine in the child contrasts with horror-images of child-abuse.
But violence remains to be his basic theme, - the physical and the
emotional suffering, inflicted by one human being unto another.
The
self-portrait for the artist's blindfolded unbent head covered with
blood occurs twice in Helnwein's triptych The Silent Glow of the
Avantgarde (1986). The middle panel shows an enlarged reproduction
of Caspar David Friedrich's The sea of Ice, a depiction of a
catastrophe of 1823/24 which is generally interpreted as a romantic
allegory of the force of nature overpowering all human effort .
Helnwein compared the "quietly theatrical" ecstatic attitude of his
self-portrait with the heroic pose of the figure of the suffering
figure of Sebastian and generalizes both to the stigma of the artist
in the 20th century, making him a kind of saviour figure. In
addition, its poetic title sets the viewer onto the right track. The
visual montage of the modern artist as Man of Sorrows with
Friedrich's landscape painting projects the dashed hopes of the
romantic rebellion into the present, to the protest thinking of
modernity, which has become introverted and masochistic, and its
crossing of aesthetic boundaries. Is romanticism making a comeback?
- No; actually, it had never left modernity. But its rebellion is
confining and introverting itself in the "body metaphysics" of
contemporary artists to its own flesh and blood. Thus, the comeback
of romanticism leads for Helnwein, too, to stressing just one of its
partial aspects, the stylizing in the form of a self-portrait of a
protest introverted to martyrdom which historically was once linked
in a contradictory way with social opposition, rebellion, and
utopia.
Mitchell Waxman wrote 2004, in The Jewish Journal, Los Angeles: "The
most powerful images that deal with Nazism and Holocaust themes are
by Anselm Kiefer and Helnwein, although, Kiefer’s work differs
considerably from Helnwein’s in his concern with the effect of
German aggression on the national psyche and the complexities of
German cultural heritage. Kiefer is known for evocative and soulful
images of barren German landscapes. But Kiefer and Helnwein’s work
are both informed by the personal experience of growing up in a
post-war German speaking country... William Burroughs said that the
American revolution begins in books and music, and political
operatives implement the changes after the fact. To this maybe we
can add art. And Helnwein's art might have the capacity to instigate
change by piercing the veil of political correctness to recapture
the primitive gesture inherent in art."
One of the most famous
paintings of Helnwein's oeuvre is Epiphany I - Adoration of the
Magi, (1996, oil and acrylic on canvas, 210 cm x 333cm, collection
of the Denver Art Museum). It is part of a series of three
paintings: Epiphany I, Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds),
Epiphany III (Presentation at the Temple), created between 1996 and
1998. In Epiphany I, SS officers surround a mother and child group.
To judge by their looks and gestures, they appear to be interested
in details such as head, face, back and genitals. The arrangement of
the figures clearly relates to motive and iconography of the
adoration of the three Magi, such as were common especially in the
German, Italian and Dutch 15th century artworks. Julia Pascal wrote
about this work in the New Statesman: "This Austrian Catholic
Nativity scene has no Magi bearing gifts. Madonna and child are
encircled by five respectful Waffen SS officers palpably in awe of
the idealised, blonde Virgin. The Christ toddler, who stands on
Mary's lap, stares defiantly out of the canvas." Helnwein's baby
Jesus is often considered to represent Adolf Hitler.
