The Painter of Newfound Truths

1. The Spiral Spins

I am convinced . . . that the act of creation has the nature of a spiral. . . . The spiral, as I

see it, is a vegetative spiral, with swellings, where the lines become thicker and thinner, like the

rings of a tree trunk, but with this difference, that they do not lie within one another, but form a

coil. Such is the philosophy of an artist who strived to spread his gospel of solutions to

economic and societal issues. His own anthology developed and grew much like his Spiral of

Creation: gradually spinning out from the centre of his youth, scrawling a deliberate yet

unguided path around and around to eventually cover the cityscape of Vienna, Austria and the

minds of artists and spectators alike. This man of many convictions was a main contributor to the

cultural color of Austria in the 20th century.

2. The Makings of an Artist

World War II exploded in the 1930s, leaving behind only chaos, catastrophe, and caustic

destruction of all forms in its wake. The citizens, bystanders to political bickering, were left with

a whopping two options: to fight a battle that wasnt theirs or to spend years fleeing from shadow

to shadow. Survival was one sentiment everyone could relate to. As religious tensions in Austria

wound tighter and tighter in 1938, it was reported that 4% of the total Austrian population was

Jewish, the majority of which lived in Vienna. Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt (Stowasser)

Hundertwasser and his mother Elsa Stowasser were among this minority. In order to avoid

persecution, they feigned Catholicism and enrolled little Friedensreich in Hitler Youth as a

precautionary measure; his mother roamed town with the Star of David on her lapel and he with

the Swastika on his shoulder.

 Though they survived, by 1943 it was counted that 69 of his maternal Jewish relatives

(including his aunt and grandmother) were killed. A massive, closely-knit family had been

whittled down to two and as a result, Hundertwasser and his mother stayed close until her death

in 1972. Young and impressionable during the time of war, young Friedensreich seemed to have

survival scrawled into the lining of his arteries and took in his observations of industrialization

linked with destruction and combined all three elements to bleed into his work in the years to

come.

3. The Road to Revelation

Life as a half-Jew had cornered Hundertwasser, leaving him barren. He had learned to

live in fear for a significant portion of his childhood, causing the colors around him to become

bleak, yet he still strived to find the thread of beauty. Upon seeing a painting of the Virgin Mary

in the church in which he was baptized (in anticipation of even more severe religious

persecution), it dawned upon him that painting would enable vivid colors to hold for centuries.

His love of the natural world around him would be eternalized.

When the war was over, he attempted art school (in the process discovering mentors like

Schiele and Kampmann) but ultimately rejected the idea of heavy-handed systematic creativity,

and so pursued a vagabond lifestyle for some time under his own supervision and set of rules. It

was in this long period of wild traveling that Friedensreich spun an incredibly individual artistic

style and had exposure to outside culture, both serving as a whetstone for his blade in an

oncoming battle.

And so, WWII undoubtedly played a significant role in Hundertwassers transformation

into an artist. In his own words, Doubtless the road I chose as an artist is casually connected
with the situation in which I grew up. My youth as a double outsider without a father and being

half Jewish has naturally contributed to my reflecting a lot and becoming aware. I became a

lone wolf, a fighter for certain matters which seemed important to me. During my childhood I

didnt have the chance to feel part of a group and thus remained a solo combatant.

4. A War to Waste and a War to Preserve

His experience of walking the tightrope, relying on a thin cord of supplies to hold one up

and keep one alive, hoping the cord doesnt vanish before reaching the safety platform on the

opposite side of the trench, wrote itself into his philosophy: One must live as though one were

at war and/everything rationed/Man must be careful/Must think independently, must

economize/Should not waste blindly. Experiencing war rationing first hand, he believed the

concept of rationing as a whole should be included in the modern lifestyle if we were to respect

Earth and our place in its natural cycle.

Hundertwasser grew to eventually fight his own war against the obstructions that

mankind wrought upon themselves. After witnessing the ruthlessness and the violence that

humans are capable of during WWII, he discovered a similarity mirrored in the violence against

our environment. The war brought earth into the city; instead of holding onto it, they are raping

it more than before. As he saw it, the modern architecture, art, and pollution produced by

humans were all collaboratively tying the noose for our planet and its inhabitability. The felling

of trees and paving of valleys was equated to the slaughtering of Jews due to the driving

motivation behind such crimes: power. Man has an increasing thirst for power over nature.

Both wars involve the oppression of the public and therefore an uprising against the

oppressors, though for different reasons: The last revolution was for freedom exploitation, from
hunger, from poverty. And here it has been successful. The new revolution is for freedom

from systematic annihilation of humanity, freedom [from] the assembly line that leads to death.

Throughout his life, he desperately hoped this recent revolution would be successful as well. He

tried to rally masses to fight against conformity and to practice restoration of creativity and

simple-living by constantly speaking out, be it through art, through writing, through public

speaking, or through leading by example.

5. Weapon of Mass Construction

Hundertwasser was strongly influenced by the post-WWII abstract expressionist

movement in Paris, a movement highly characterized by utilizing anxiety and trauma from the

previously high tensions of the war and referencing political arguments of the era. In the same

way, Hundertwasser framed his political and social arguments about the standards of society

through his vibrant, purposeful art and nomadic manifestos. He blended painting, philosophy,

architecture, writing, and ecology in order to create this massive, diverse portfolio that he could

slap down on the desk of humankind as a response and solution to our progress. He didnt see

our progress as progress at all; he saw it as a fast-track to our untimely demise because we had

been unconsciously working against the natural habitat and regulations in our development. We

were working backwards in his eyes.

I found myself briefly wondering why he didnt take some initiative as a politician if he

felt so passionately about such an immense issue, but was soon quieted with an answer that can

be traced back to his speech at Leopoldskron Castle in Salzburg circa 1948. Standing before an

audience, he declared Everyone can and must be creative. Why? Because he didnt think it

necessary to be in an official political position in order to make a positive change; he believed

that creativity can be used as a force. Many would shrug off his notion as a way to garner

attention from the art community, but he saw it as a crucial factor in the battle for healing.

Therefore, as an artist he still had the power to rehabilitate and inspire his community. When

WWII had come to a close, young Friedensreich realized that he had his own weapon to use in

WWIII: Nature vs. Man.

One key aspect to this new weapon was the newfound concept of transautomatism,

vaguely defined as the departure towards new creativity. Hundertwasser cultivated this theory

as the vanguard for transcending the superficial trend of automatic art by playing a role in

transforming the audiences point of view and opening the world up to them in an entirely new

way, allowing them to participate in the materialization of the art piece. Transautomatism =

general mobilisation of the eye. By way of Transautomatism, Hundertwasser was hoping to

expand upon his mission of completely reconstructing societal values and lifestyle to coincide

harmoniously with nature via triggering the audience to make connections in their environment

themselves; in other words, take the role of the artist. As Pierre Restany put it, his theory of

Transautomatism was both a criticism of the publics perceptive illiteracy and an affirmation of

the necessity for the creative involvement of that public in the work of art. If Hundertwasser

had succeeded in advancing his audiences ability to see so to speak, he would have been one

step closer to societal reformation.

6. A Call to Arms
Through his work, Hundertwasser wanted to show how basically simple it is to have

paradise on earth. He believed that through an alternative, non-conforming lifestyle heavily

intertwined with a deep reverence and adoration for Earth, humankind could reach the closest

form of a utopia that we could ever manage.

 Feeling as though we have lost touch with the complete cycle of natural living,

Hundertwasser developed manifestos that dealt mostly with reclaiming ourselves and our role in

this world after being jostled and wrapped by the industrial revolution. When one sews his

manifestos together into a wordy quilt, it forms a set of instructions, a sort of scaffolding, to strip

the uniform thats buttoned onto us from the moment were born and find our own unique

freedom through individuality. He dreamed of communities made of entirely different, humble

houses, each with a forest on the roof to replace the land it stands upon, handmade clothes to the

likings of each individual, art everywhere, and not a straight line in sight. Even the education

system would be totally transformed to suit the needs and interests of the individual.

And, like a true leader, he practiced what he preached: I should like, and I do it too quite

instinctively, to live an example, live an example to people, paint for them a paradise that each

may have, he need only grasp it. His burning desire was for his words to not go unheeded; if he

was not creating art out of the necessity of individual expression, he was creating art to plead

with his peers to contemplate his message while he felt there was still a chance to rehabilitate the

damage done to ourselves and our environment.

Besides our pollution and general lack of consideration for our planet, nothing terrified

and disgusted Hundertwasser more than methodology and the straight line. Both, he examined,

would suffocate our very souls and completely bar us from every liberty weve known by

undermining the need for natural creativity, natural movement, natural resourcefulness, and

natural relationships. What purpose would we serve then? What would be the point of living if

we were to live unconsciously? Once he realized in 1953 that the straight line leads to the

downfall of humanity, he pressed for an immediate rebellion against the perpetrator. Urging for
an uprising against personal systematic oppression, he and two other scholarly collaborators

beseeched the public: We call on the Austrian people to put up passive resistance to

automatisation, sterilisation, and uniformisation, for only those who think and live creatively

will survive in this life and beyond.

Alas, his ideal rebellion would not hold. As he and the country grew older, he observed in

a panic that the society he wanted so deeply to love was stubbornly ignoring his messages. His

manifestos grew bitter, and more serious, and he repeated his ideas, frequently making

amendments and adding on to plans, providing extra blueprints to make the adaptation of a

sustainable lifestyle easier. The relationship between men and trees must gain a religious

dimension, he preached. Then one will understand that it is true if we say: the straight line is

godless and immoral.

As time crawled forward, he sensed a brooding onslaught on the horizon:The earth will

avenge itself, and when the earth, probably very soon, rebels once again, it wont have been my

fault.

7. Walking Hand in Hand

Meandering along Viennas twisting streets back in September of 2015, I grasped at what

he meant. There were some terribly dull, offensive buildings that struck up from a land of

concrete and jabbed into the sky: a result of mod-architecture. Most of what I observed,

Hundertwasser described perfectly in an excerpt from My Eyes Are Tired: But they are

building cubes, cubes! At the perpendicular corners of Vienna. Madness. Delusion. Where is the

conscience, if not of the masses, at least of the others? and this was his grievance in 1957.

He would be heartbroken to learn that whats considered modern in this century is the very
design movement he was fighting against.

All through his artistic career he screamed out against the moral uninhabitability of

utilitarian, functional architecture, this being immoral because its so entirely removed from

nature; it resembles nothing natural. Its like plucking a human from the diverse and rich forest

and placing them in a shoebox diorama, completely removing them from any instinct and natural

health preconditions.

Distinct, opposing differences with nature evolved alongside mankind, one particularly

noted by Hundertwasser: the horizontal belongs to nature - the vertical may belong to men.

Such positional laws can still be observed today in the architecture, showing that his guidance to

alternative development went unfollowed. He pushed for an essential reafforestationof towns

to be another step in the right direction, yet the only trees I saw in Vienna and other populous

Austrian cities were the ones in designated areas such as parks and gardens policed rather

than given free reign. That is not respect, that is domination.

I found Vienna to be surprisingly rigid and sterile. There were strict social expectations

for each person and hardly enough whimsy to soften the citys stiff upper lip. However, when I

found myself standing on the sloping wooden and earthenware-tiled floors of the

KunstHausWien, I was forced to re-evaluate my opinion. This museum, designed by

Hundertwasser himself, illuminated the colorful aspects of Viennas culture that had up to this

point been too hidden for me to see.

I realized that Hundertwasser was not a societal outcast or squashed underfoot; in fact, Vienna is

extremely proud of Hundertwasser. In a way, they have transformed his legacy into a tourist

attraction. Ask any Viennese round the corner and they point you in the direction of the
KunstHausWien for an education. Youll find yourself traipsing through the 2-story exhibit with

others, either there for the first time, learning, or there for the hundredth time, admiring. In this

way, he has become an icon in their society. Though the people of Austria generally havent

acted upon his instructions, they definitely revere him.

8. Garden of the Happy Dead

19 February 2000. The spirals pace slows to a stop. A force drops down from aboard the

Queen Elizabeth 2 and impacts the ocean floor, sending a ripple throughout the Pacific:

Friedensreich Hundertwasser has died during the voyage to Europe from New Zealand.

However, all is not lost: in the wake of his death, his lifes work remains to represent the artist

and his message. His words personify a true visionary spirit, one filled with love and concern for

his environment and everything in it. To me, he will forever stand as a real-life wizard.

His wizardry even went so far as to orchestrate the specifics of his death. He would be

buried in a spiral garden he designed himself (in which trees grew out of bodies), because the

spiral is a symbol of the cycle of death and rebirth, of eternal life. His everlasting spiral was

ritualistic in more ways than one; its how he processed his thoughts and approached his realities.

My spiral grows and dies like a plant - the lines of the spiral, like a meandering river, follow the

laws of growth of a plant. I let it take its own course and go along with it. In this way I make no

mistakes.