GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN

March 28, 2009: Gottfried Helnwein receives the 2009 Steiger Art Award

PRESSARTICLES

14. September 2008

The Sunday Times

Culture

Gerry McCarthy

BLOODIED BUT UNBOWED

Fury greeted Gottfried Helnwein's Waterford Installation, but his art deals in public trauma, says Gerry McCarthy

Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings. He has used Christian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence. Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think."

His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command large prices. As he talks in his Co Tipperary castle, garbed in black clothes and dark glasses, Helnwein has the air of a veteran rock star and the lifestyle to match it.

They left Mickey Mouse undamaged, says Gottfried Helnwein. Whoever attacked his photographic triptych, The Last Child, as it was displayed in a Waterford street, concentrated their fury on the Image of a girl with a bloodied face. "Somebody slashed it from bottom to top," he says. "But we will keep it on view. When you put art in a public space, the reactions are part of it."

If Helnwein seems unfazed, it is because he has been in situations like this before. The artist, Austrian-born but now an Irish citizen, has a long history of attracting controversy. His paintings employ impeccable technique in the service of disturbing Images.

"Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think."

His own paintings hang on the Walls inside, vast in scale. A human foetus, 50 times larger than life, seems to have the face of an old man. Others Works are loosely based on Goya's Disasters of War. The castle's huge rooms can barely contain them.

Such opulence is a long way from his roots. He was born in a poor quarter of Vienna in 1948, when the City was still occupied by the Allied powers. His family lived in the Soviet sector: he remembers grim-faced people and Russian tanks on the streets. But while the effects of war were everywhere, there was little talk about the root causes of such devastation: the subject of the Holocaust was taboo.

"Nothing was mentioned in school, there was complete silence. It didn't exist," Helnwein recalls. "But I researched it on my own, I talked with witnesses. I was obsessed with the search: it had to do, in a naive sense, with justice. When I found out all these gruesome details about concentration camps, everything stopped for me. I didn't belong. I didn't want to be a part of that society."

Helnwein's generation turned against their parents. "They were all part of it in some way," he says. "But they were unable to reflect on it." Yet he also scorned the revolutionary styles of the 1960s. "There were Trostkyites and Maoists, all middle or upper dass, all fighting one another. They talked about the working class, but the real working class thought they were weirdos and idiots. I was more interested in the victims." For a while, he had sought redemption elsewhere: "America was my first hope. In the darkness of my childhood, when I got my first Donald Duck comic-book, it was like opening the doors to heaven."

But this hope soured, too, first with the Kennedy assassination, then with the Vietnam war. He began to make paintings based on atrocities committed by American troops, while remaining aloof from those who marched against the war. Marching, he says, is a very German thing to do: "Every country has its dark side, but that's the Germans. They need to march, and to beat people up. We know they are very efficient when they work in groups. I don't say Austria is better. You don't have neo-Nazis marching, but you have people with cellars. And a second family down there."

There is nothing coincidental, he adds, in the fact that the notorious cases of the imprisoned Natascha Kampusch and the incestuous Josef Fritzl have lately come to light: "Austria is more covert. It's all at home. You have your little concentration camp underneath.“

Yet for all that, Helnwein admits he has not been able to leave his homeland totally behind, particularly when it comes to the uncomfortable concerns of his work: "My art is rooted in Austrian art. That's something you can't escape. I'm in that tradition. It always had a very dark side - look at Kafka or Egon Schiele."

When he began painting, however, he knew little of art history or the art market. He was taken aback when visitors to his first show asked about buying some works: selling them had not occurred to him. He lad been too busy painting obsessively, combining a prolific output with his parallel research into atrocities.

His obsession now is globalisation and the corporate forces he sees behind it, mostly American. He was delighted, too, when Ireland voted against the Lisbon treaty: "It shows that the people are still stubborn, still have independence left; they’re not completely carried away by the propaganda. This treaty would have ended the sovereignty of every country in Europe."

For someone, seemingly, so sceptical, Helnwein still exudes the air of a dreamer, particularly when it comes to his adopted home. In Ireland, he says, he has found peace, and a sense of being at home. This came as a shock to him. He was already middle-aged, married with four children, wealthy from his art. He had turned his back on his original home in Austria and grown estranged from his surrogate parent, America. He did not expect to experience the sense of belonging anywhere again.

"I look out of the plane, I see Ireland and I almost get tears," he says. "I feel so attached and so connected that I think it's where I belong." Does he know where this feeling comes from? "It took me a while to figure it out," he replies. "The landscape is great, but it's the people and their culture. I don't mean the high culture, I mean the culture they have passed on for a thousand years."

But he has noticed that Ireland, too, has built silences around certain topics. When he first arrived, he was eager to talk about Michael Collins, whom he sees as a great hero -"a genius, politically, doing the right thing at the right moment and changing the course of history." But he saw the shutters come down when the civil war was brought up.

But having grown up among much deeper silences, Helnwein understands our occasional evasions and reticences. He respects them: they are "qualities in people that don't exist in other places - I never felt any prejudice here, which is weird".

Even so, he anticipated that there might be some negative reaction in Waterford. Art is one thing when confined to a gallery, but when out in the open, it stakes a claim on public space: "There are some very tough pieces, children with uniforms covered in blood. I suddenly realised, Waterford is so innocent compared to other places. It's not New York or Vienna."

This explains his phlegmatic response to the attack: he had expected it. For Helnwein, it even validates the work.

By confronting us with images of brutalised children, he has goaded somebody into brutalising an image of a child. It is this Pavlovian dance of image and reaction - which goes far deeper than merely trying to shock - that his work aims for.

"Whatever I do comes out of inner necessity. That's how I started to paint: it was my response to the world around me. At first, I was surprised by how emotionally people would react. Then I saw the response in the media, and I thought, ‘I have a really powerful language.'“

Despite the repeated failure of his icons, Helnwein remains a dreamer. His earlier illusions turned to ash: now he is starting to dream of Ireland. Apart from some landscapes and one of the children depicted in Waterford, he has not yet used Irish themes. But he says that he is thinking about it.

This may be a more difficult task than he knows. For a man whose art is so deeply rooted in pain and secrets - in Austria's Nazi past and America's betrayal of hope - it may be impossible to move serenely on to less disturbing work. For all his new-found sense of belonging, Helnwein is still the artist formed by the country where he was born. A man may change his nationality, but an artist needs deep roots -however repellent he may find them.

30. May 2008

Los Angeles Times

Arts & Culture

Lynell George

GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN - DARK INSPIRATION

The artist, who has taken on war crimes, Catholicism and the Holocaust in his works, is inspired by the city.

Some might think that Los Angeles - its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch -- is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and "veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive." People are surprised, he says, when they discern that he doesn't "seem insane."

FROM the outside you wouldn't know what sort of workshop this door obscures -- the fantasies or nightmares. Gottfried Helnwein's studio sits at the end of a quiet downtown cul-de-sac; its largest window offers up an unhindered view of power lines, asphalt and a vast industrial space a few blocks away, whose intricate graffiti he keeps watch on. "Truly, it's quite remarkable."

It's not exactly the heart of the city. Perhaps though, you could say it is the spleen -- the seat of L.A.'s spirit. This narrow curve of artery, crowded with faded brick or concrete two- and three-story structures, rises above pock-marked asphalt that snakes through the edges of the arts district. Here on this evocative, sketchy block, the Austrian-born artist fell in love with Los Angeles and decided to decamp his Irish castle (part-time anyway) to call L.A. home.

As much as what he physically keeps close by while he works -- the books, newspapers, CDs, rubber dolls and plastic figurines -- the city's essence itself feeds his dark, uneasy work, which tends toward hyper-real renderings of violence and the grotesque: bandaged, broken children, scenes of torture, pooling blood, grimacing visages. "Ireland is paradise," he says, "but almost too. For my work I need an urban environment."

Some might think that Los Angeles -- its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch -- is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium -- watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture -- is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors.

His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. "Epiphany I (Adoration of a Magi)," a 1996 painting, renders the infant -- interpreted both as Hitler and Christ -- as being visited by not three men but five, in S.S. uniforms. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and "veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive." People are surprised, he says, when they discern that he doesn't "seem insane."

The visceral reactions, he's come to realize, have as much to do with what's already in the viewers head as what he's created. "It's not my piece of canvas with tiny fractions of pigment," he explains. "The . . . art . . . has the potential of putting that finger on the spot, and it can trigger something that you'd rather not like to look at. But it's [already] in your own mind. That's what I think art can do."

L.A., says Helnwein, "has this strange magic." He'd been visiting for years, and something about the city took hold. "I can give you a long list of things that are going bad right now, but if you want to look for something good, if there is a place that comes close to really, total freedom, L.A. is that place. . . . L.A. allows you the freedom to dream up impossible things."

'Struggling with the world'

HE walks the seven minutes to the studio from his home, often in the dark of morning, always surrounded by the theater of his thoughts. "I read a lot and study every day," he says. "The ideas are always in me. Most of the time I'm working in my head, not on the canvas. It's like I'm struggling with the world around me."

By the time he's in the studio and has made a cup of tea, Helnwein has already processed the morning's news. It hums in his head. The walk allows him to synthesize.

Helnwein stands in the studio's entry room, a spacious, high-ceilinged space surrounded by 13 grand, new canvases in various stages of near-completion -- a bandaged young girl with a bloody head wound; the nose of a gun pointed at a doll; a raging Mouseketeer in blackface. Helnwein himself is as shrouded as one of the gauze-wrapped, back-lighted figures in those paintings -- his forehead is wrapped in a bandanna, and glasses with opaque lenses hide expression, intention. He's just nose, a flash of smile, a slick cowlick of hair jutting up, eluding capture.

Although he lives with a loop of disquieting images in his head and on his walls, there are plenty who eagerly pay to possess them -- Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn and Robert Wilson among them. He's collaborated with Marilyn Manson, done cover art for the Scorpions, designed sets and costumes for U.S. and European operas, including a much-discussed L.A. Opera production of Richard Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier" in 2005.

On the afternoon of this visit, an exhibition deadline breathes down his neck. "But!" he stresses, extending an index finger, pressure is the best catalyst for his work. "My canvases always arrive wet. They dry on the wall. Now it's like the last days of Pompeii." One of his sons will come by later to carefully cart up and ship the work. "That's why you have children. They have to help you." A flash of teeth, a laugh follows. "Seriously, we have four children," he says. "I like it when kids are running through the studio. We are like a band of Gypsies."

He winds through the narrow hallway that runs parallel to a series of smaller rooms -- hidden nooks, a loft where his wife, Renate, makes a stream of business calls. On the south-facing wall of his work space hang several unfinished canvases from a current series titled "Disasters of War." "It is in memory of Francisco Goya because 200 years ago, when he witnessed the war and cruelties in Spain, he made this series. I felt it was time to do it again. Completely different because with me the central theme is always the child. I want to see what's going on through the child's eyes." They are, he says, metaphors, "for the potential of innocence."

Shaped by World War II

ON one end of the brick-walled room, a long rolling table holds scores of books, there to flip through for quick reference, inspiration: volumes on Vermeer and Bosch, "Movies of the Thirties," "R. Crumb Handbook," "Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots." Another table is a jumble of paint tubes and brushes. Within a long arm's reach of his work in progress are a set of steel baker's racks holding a stereo and piles of CDs -- Beethoven, Schubert, Bach. "I listen to classical music and the blues. My daughter Mercedes . . . knows anybody who ever was singing the blues." The rest of the shelves are taken up with audio books -- "Buddenbrooks," "Huck Finn," James Ellroy's "Suicide Hill." "There are all these things that I want to read, but I don't have the time. So this is fantastic," he explains, "because when you paint so realistic . . . you need to sometimes paint hour after hour, and so I found out that I can listen so intensely."

His work routine extends his obsessive study of the world. "The task for me, for my life, since I was a kid, [is] I want to find out what is really going on," says Helnwein. "I was born in Vienna after the Second World War. Vienna was a very depressed place. And it was dark. I remembered never seeing anyone smile a lot. I never heard a song. People were broken. The Second World War was lost -- the Nazi time was over -- we were wrong again. Overnight, everybody was for democracy. So you can guess what that means."

The turnabout made him suspicious. It also filled him with questions that made people squirm. "Art, for myself, is a way to carry on this research in an aesthetic means. You always have to question: Why is that guy saying that now?"

Just behind the CD stacks, a few hundred or so dolls, rubber superheroes, manga characters, dismembered Kewpies, blackface salt and pepper shakers recline on a shelf. "These are some of the models for the paintings," Helnwein says. "What I'm really interested in is the artificiality. The strange reality -- like you have in these video games and animated movies."

He may splice the dolls together with scenes of everyday reality -- an image drawn from his loop of thoughts. "The pieces are narrative," he says, "like one frozen second of a story. There is always something after it and always something before it. That's what I pass on to my viewers, 'the onlookers.' "

Much of his aesthetic inspiration, he explains, comes from America -- film, rock 'n' roll, comics. "Because when I was a kid, I was living in this limbo. My parents seemed strange to me. There was this strange silence." Somewhere in that blank, dark space, landed an American comic book -- the adventures of Donald Duck.

"It was like stepping into this miraculous universe. . . . There were no limits. You could be pierced with a bullet and walk again. I felt right away at home," he says. "America was winning throughout the world so kids [here] wanted to identify with heroes. And Donald Duck is the opposite. In Europe, where everything was destroyed -- Donald Duck the loser, fitted much more. I love this duck. It is amazing he made it at all."

What occupies most of the wall space, like a still to-be-mined thought, is a sampling of the past, older paintings, each a starkly different point on a map of his evolution: A noir-esque series based on "these images of my childhood, like black and white movies." A monochromatic diptych dedicated to writer Antonin Artaud. "He was one of the great, amazing artists. Completely failed of course. He was too radical," Helnwein says. And grouped on a far wall, a photo montage, "48 Poems," images distorted to the point that they mimic the effect of peering through steam or clouds.

"It's people who died a violent death," he explains. "I collected the photographs from different morgues in Europe . . . photographed them again, and then again until it started to get blurred. Each face is connected to a real story, a tragedy.

"When you come closer, the less you see. But if you go away the more you see. Close up, it's just an abstract nothing. Almost nothing. It's connected to a real human being's story, but at the same time it's fading away like an old memory."

He steps closer, then steps away; repeats the motion once more: "You have to force people not to forget. This is why Goya painted all of those cruel themes. Not because he was a sadist but because he knew we'd forget. That's the mechanism I don't understand. There needs to be somebody who holds it in your face. All the time."

10. April 2006

New Statesman, UK

Julia Pascal

NAZI DREAMING

"Face it" Helnwein exhibition at Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz

Gottfried Helnwein's latest exhibition, "Face It", is the artist's first show in his native Austria since 1985. A retrospective of 40 works from the 1970s to the present, it is more shocking than the Royal Academy's infamous "Sensation" of 1997. Helnwein aims to disturb not with, say, an elephant-dung Madonna, as Chris Ofili did then, but with a far more controversial Virgin.

Of all his paintings, the most disturbing is Epiphany (1996), for which he dips into our collective memory of Christianity's most famous birth. 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, kitsch-blonde Virgin. The Christ toddler, who stands on Mary's lap, stares defiantly out of the canvas. Helnwein's baby Jesus is Adolf Hitler.

ART - Julia Pascal on the man set on reminding Austria of the past it would rather forget

In his last will, the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard, who died in 1989, banned the production of his texts on home soil. Bernhard never hid his fury at Austria's refusal to admit its history. Helnwein, born in 1948, clearly shares Bernhard's view. He is furious about Austria's self-image as victim of the Third Reich, rather than its willing collaborator.

In 1965 posters for the Freedom Party, later led by Jörg Haider, demanded: "Forget about the past! Look ahead at the future." Helnwein, then still a teenager, reacted by painting a portrait of Adolf Hitler that got him expelled from art school. His "crime" was to have reminded Austria of its best-known son.

Since then, Helnwein's work has often provoked howls of anger at home. In the early 1970s, he was part of the Wiener Aktionisten ("Vienna Activists"). These dissenters were the interface between street theatre, public art and political protest. They threatened Austria's collective amnesia. Most were either imprisoned or forced into exile. In 1971, protesters defaced his first public Aktion with stickers which, without a trace of irony, proclaimed the work as entartete Kunst - the Nazi term for degenerate art. The mayor of Vienna ordered the police to confiscate his canvases. A year later, another exhibition in Vienna closed prematurely after threats of local council strikes.

Helnwein consistently refuses to allow Austria (and Germany) to whitewash the Hitler years. In 1988, on the 50th anni- versary of Kristallnacht, he constructed a four-metre-high, hundred-metre-long "picture wall" of enlarged photographic portraits of young children and erected the installation in central Cologne between the Museum Ludwig and the cathedral. He titled the work Selektion - a reference to those selected to be gassed in the concentration camps. Several photos got slashed. He further inflamed opinion by making a picture of a dead child slumped over a bowl of food. It was a direct accusation against Heinrich Gross, a leading psychiatrist who admitted in the 1970s that hundreds of children were poisoned at a Nazi-era hospital where he worked.

Helnwein's art is never easy entertainment. Varying his techniques, he uses oil, acrylics, collage, computer manipulation or digital print, and challenges audiences to make their own "readings". A group of photographic self-portraits, Der Untermensch (1970-87), includes images of the artist in Nazi costume, his face a mask of black make-up except for a white mouth. There is a series of foetus images: one has a nose reminiscent of Julius Streicher's stereotypical Jew. When, as a young man, Helnwein cut his face and hands on the edges of skis, or with razors or wood engraving tools, it prompted him to paint bandaged figures starting with his own body. Immolation is a constant reference. The theme plays out on several levels.

Certainly his presentation of damaged children evokes direct associations with Dr Mengele's experiments, but he has also photographed young girls dressed in SS hats, thus provoking questions about the effect of the Third Reich on the next generation of Austrians and Germans. As the Russian art critic Alexander Borovsky notes, there is "no abstract existential angst" to Helnwein's impulses. Rather, they are deliberate critiques of perversion, by Nazi culture and by our own.

Although Helnwein's work is rooted in the legacy of German expressionism, he has absorbed elements of American pop culture. In 1977 he became interested in adapting Disney cartoons. Of that time, he has said: "I learned more from Donald Duck than anything in school." His earlier series Peinlich ("Embarrassing") - pencil, watercolour and India ink on cardboard - shows a typical 1950s little girl in a pink dress and carrying a comic. Her innocent appeal is destroyed by the gash deforming her cheek and lips. It is as if Donald Duck had met Mengele.

Helnwein declares himself fascinated by the relationship between "high" and "trivial" art, and has enjoyed an important relationship with American celebrity, living between Los Angeles and Ireland. He met and photographed the Rolling Stones in London, and his portrait of John F Kennedy made the front cover of Time on the 20th anniversary of the president's assassination. Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali posed for him; he shot the cover for one of Michael Jackson's albums. 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.

arts

John F Kennedy made the front cover of Time on the 20th anniversary of the president’s assassination. Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali posed for him; he shot the cover for one of Michael Jackson’s albums. Examining his imaginary 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.

Helnwein also has a strong sense of theatre. He has worked in opera, designing sets and costumes for Maximilian Schell and working with the equally notorious Austrian choreographer Johann Kresnik. His poster for the 1988 production of Lulu at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg caused outrage across Europe. A tiny Sigmung Freud in a long coat stares up at a gigantic woman, who lifts her skirt to expose her vagina. The opposite of porn, it provocatively illustrates Wedekind’s view of a sexually ambiguous bourgouis society on the brink of destruction. This iconography overturns the 1929 screen image of Louise Brooks as Lulu in G W Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. Whereas that film presents us with a face, Helnwein shows the pubis. Of all his paintings, the most disturbing is Epiphany (1996), for which he dips into our collective memory of Christianity’s most famous birth. 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, kitsch-blonde Virgin. The Christ toddler, who stands on Mary’s lap stares defiantly out of the canvas. Helnwein’s baby Jesus is Adolf Hitler.

“ Face it “ is at the Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria, until 5 June. For further details go to www.lentos.at /de or to www.helnwein.com

01. August 2001

The Irish Times

Aiden Dunne

CUTTING EDGE

While it is a painting, Epiphany is typical in its almost interchangeable use of photography and painting: both played their part in the achievement of the eventual, quasi-photographic image. He is a fine photographer, and his photographic portraits of Kilkenny children (enlarged to an enormous scale) form one strand of his festival exhibitions. The careful adaptation of existing imagery is another trait, and his references extend back through fine art history as well as history itself...

Artist Gottfried Helnwein does not tread lightly with his art - Nazis, mutilation and surgical instruments regularly crop up in his work. Aiden Dunne warns festival-goers what to expect.

In Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's Epiphany, Nazi officers in uniform cluster around an Aryan woman, an icy blonde Madonna. She supports a naked infant who, it occurs to you, resembles Adolf Hitler, particularly as it has a precocious moustache. For an Austrian artist to venture into this highly charged terrain, blatantly conflating Christian and Nazi iconography, and doing so with work that had such an ambiguous edge and leaves a lot to our own imaginations, suggests a particularly provocative sensibility.

And, on the score, Helnwein certainly fits the bill, as a lot of people will discover when they encounter his work at first hand during the Kilkenny Arts Festival. In fact, his work, distributed over several venues, will be hard to miss. He makes sure of that.

Incidentally, he does not come to Kilkenny as a stranger. For several years he and his wife Renate have lived in a castle in Co. Tipperary. A technically proficient, immensely versatile artist who seems to think instinctively on a grand scale, he had systematically broken taboos. Some of his earliest public "actions" involved cutting himself with razor blades. These were very much in keeping with a taste for elaborate performance featuring violent, bloody spectacle typical of Herman Nitsch and the notorious Vienna Group.

There is an account of a late 1970s performance by Helnwein in which he drove around in Nazi regalia, his head bandaged and apparently bleeding. Since then he has become much more confrontational in his approach. He anticipated British artist Gillian Wearing by a number of years in wandering the streets with his head and face swathed in bandages, recording the reactions of passers-by.

As will be readily apparent from his Kilkenny exhibitions, scale is an important part of his strategy because, he wants to engage with the widest possible public. To this end, transgression is also central. Many of his images set out expressly to stop us in our tracks, confronting us with scenes of what look alarmingly like grotesque surgical experiments, of horrible torture, of children in distressing situations, of distorted and mutated flesh.

It's not all Grand Guignol though. An extremely impressive work (not that unlike a piece planned for Kilkenny), Selection, made in 1988, consisted of a series of uniform, huge images of children's faces, stretching from Cologne's Ludwig Museum to its cathedral. The subtitle, (Ninth November Night), gave the clue to the event the work marked - the start of the Holocaust on Reichskristallnacht, November 9, 1938.

In presenting people with a series of entirely neutral, if rather beautiful, pictures of innocence and implicitly pointing out that just such innocents were sorted and selected for extermination, Helnwein was resurrecting an aspect of the past that most Germans and, perhaps even more so, Austrians, have preferred to forget.

It certainly annoyed someone to the extent that they came and vandalised it, symbolically cutting the throats of some of the images. Selection shares with Helnwein's more sensational work a desire to prod us into thought about our own attitudes and roles. The real horror, as his work reiterates, is indifference and complacency.

The artist has always assumed the freedom to range across media and disciplines, but in his own terms. The word "theatrical" inevitably comes to mind in relation to his work, and he has worked a great deal in theatre, designing sets and posters (not without controversy). As an illustrator, he has covers for Time and Stern magazines to his credit. He seems equally at home with performance, film, photography and painting.

Long interested in celebrity, he made a series of harsh, confrontational photographic portraits of such diverse icons as Michael Jackson and William S. Burroughs. One series of paintings features such Disney characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But even these benign presences gain a slightly sinister edge when given the Helnwein treatment.

17. November 2004

San Francisco Chronicle

Steven Winn

Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic

CHILDHOOD ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE. IN THE ARTS, IT'S DARK AND COMPLEX.

Gottfried Helnwein's work is on display at the Legion of Honor and at Modernism Inc.

Her lips are parted and colored a luscious deep red. The pancake makeup on her face gives off a marble-white glow. A jacket, adorned with braided gold epaulets at the shoulders, yawns open, exposing a wide expanse of skin down her chest. She appears to be about 8 years old.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the subject of Gottfried Helnwein's new, large-format digital prints at San Francisco's Modernism Gallery might have alarmed or even scandalized a viewer. Not anymore -- or at least not so reflexively...

Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.

But the most haunting images, here and across town at Modernism, may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes.

sf-station

San Francisco

Nirmala Nataraj

GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN'S THE CHILD - INNOCENCE LOST

Beyond his treatment of common children's motifs - dolls, toys and ambivalent nymphets- Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's vision is shrouded in an aura of enigmatic darkness. With his giant color portraits of stillborn babies; paintings that juxtapose Nazi-era photographs with his own images; and pictures of deformed, abjectly countenanced children swathed in bandages, Helnwein is preoccupied with the indelible suffering that mirrors the more delicate aspects of youth. His work is hauntingly gorgeous and suffused with pathos, precisely because viewers are immediately aware of the larger threat that looms within the pieces: the rupture of innocence.

Helnwein's body of work entitled The Child is currently on exhibition at the Legion of Honor. Consisting of 29 paintings, 13 drawings/watercolors, and 20 photographs created over a 35-year period, his oeuvre emphasizes the psychic and physical wounds inflicted upon the blameless. With subtexts like war and sexual exploitation, Helnwein has produced an eerie parable of innocence lost.

Helnwein is accustomed to violent reactions against his work. In 1988, for the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust, Helnwein financed his own exhibition to remind people of the era's horrors. Featuring a large-scale series of children's portraits spanning the various ethnicities in Germany at the time of the Third Reich, Helnwein called his work Selektion, to emphasize the Nazi practice of selecting "subhuman" peoples for extermination. While invectives have been hurled at Helnwein for his "exploitation" of children's images for moribund purposes, Selektion is a persuasive reminder of innocence and the price exacted upon it when people choose to discount the grave reality of suffering and cruelty.

The Child illustrates a continuance in Helnwein's themes, especially with his large, monochromatic "Epiphany" series. In "Epiphany I: Adoration of the Magi" (1996), a group of SS soldiers gazes adoringly upon a placid looking woman who holds a naked baby on her lap. Part redemptive and part ironic, it's a farcical send-up of the original Nativity tradition. Helnwein used an archived photo in which the person originally in the place of the child was Hitler. While the painting is disconnected from a discrete narrative and one wouldn't necessarily know, upon observation, that the sinister men in the piece are SS soldiers, Helnwein's work is rendered with oppressive reverence that is immediately apparent. According to Helnwein, "There are many connections between the Third Reich and the Christian churches in Austria and German"; the moral complicity of trusted institutions is the source of his brilliant, black satire.

While his exhibition primarily portrays children, Helnwein is deeply invested in the fantasy world of the child, which evokes both awe and repulsion. In "Midnight Mickey" (2001), a static representation of a popular cartoon character exposes the violence inherent in animated icons while eliminating the possibility of a humorous punch line. Blown up to tremendous scale and realized in a somber gray palette, "Midnight Mickey" is physically distorted, his customarily jovial grin contorted into a menacing leer that induces frightful musings of things that go bump in the night.

Earlier works by Helnwein, like "Sunday's Child" (1972) are dark comic tour de forces- absurdist fantasies coated with hyper-realism and vitriolic commentary. "Sunday's Child" features a knapsack-toting duck slavering over a popsicle, and an adolescent girl in winter garb standing outside a shop window covered with advertisements and other symbols of mass consumerism. The expression on her face is unreadable- her tongue protrudes in what could either be a lascivious gesture or an indication of simple pleasure. In fact, the work is confounded by indeterminacy: we see rivulets of blood running down the girl's legs, but we don't know if she's a victim of sexual violence or early menstruation.

Helnwein's later work is more gentle, more concerned with the specificity of his subject. "Child of Light II" (1972) is a photo documentation in which a gossamer light radiates from the head and hands of a young girl covered in bandages and tubes around her face. It is an image that suggests both beauty and death, in which the child is heroized by her self-radiating stigmata.

"Head of a Child V" (1998) is engulfed in the same quiet drama that accompanies Helnwein's later photographic paintings. Detailed down to the very pores of the young girl's skin, the foreground of her face is flushed with a saintly glow. Her eyes are closed, but her brows are furrowed, bestowing her with a contemplative mien that is both severe and peaceful.

Helnwein's "Angel Sleeping" series (1999) offers several colossal images of what appear to be either stillborn babies or fetuses. Ranging from deformed and leprous to ethereal and slumberous, Helnwein's images transcend their grotesque implications and are bathed in amniotic tranquility and compassionate reverence. Helnwein no longer seems to be invested in overt political analysis, but in the subtle rhythms of human experience.

Helnwein has always said that he paints children because they symbolize humanity better than adults. This may be so, but perhaps Helnwein's images are so profoundly disturbing because of the disparity between the portrayal of children- in all their idealized purity- and the portrayal of suffering. His work is a mesmerizing commentary not only on the exploitation of children in our culture, but also on emotional vacancy and moral torpor, which too often implicate us in the pain of others. By consciously mingling his themes of purity and culpability, Helnwein has presented viewers with a disorienting yet provocative way of apprehending both history and suffering.

01. November 2000

Artweek

Celebrating 30 Years

Alicia Miller

'THE DARKER SIDE OF PLAYLAND: CHILDHOOD IMAGERY FROM THE LOGAN COLLECTION' AT SFMOMA

Reviews

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 favotite 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.

04. August 2004

The Mercury News

Anita Amirrezvani

INNOCENCE LOST

THOUGHT-PROVOKING ART BY HELNWEIN DISTURBS IN REMARKABLE SAN FRANCISCO SHOW

A new exhibit called "The Child," through Nov. 28 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, presents images of distressed, wounded or threatened children, a topic that has fascinated Helnwein for years.

Many of the children depicted in the show have deformities, bandages, scars or wounds; some appear threatened by menacing adults or by mayhem. Their suffering, indeed wrenching to witness, inevitably becomes a statement about the human condition.

A 55-year-old father of four, Helnwein sees himself as an artist with a message. "A big part of contemporary art is not connected to anything," he said. "It's important for certain artists to respond to what's going on in present time."

Curator Robert Flynn Johnson believes it is appropriate to display art with a moral message. "Museums shouldn't be like Rip Van Winkle, in a state of catatonic sleep," he says. "They should take on issues. Otherwise they will be seen just as a low-grade entertainment vehicle. We're not out to shock -- we're out to make people think."

Johnson places Helnwein in the tradition of such contemporary activist artists as filmmakers Michael Moore ("Fahrenheit 9/11") and Errol Morris ("The Fog of War"), painter Gerhard Richter and painter Sue Coe, whose "deadmeat prints" include images of animal slaughter.

Museum officials have posted notices in the museum lobby and outside the gallery to warn people that viewer discretion is advised.

Officials at the Legion hope the exhibit will reach an audience that more typically comes to blockbuster shows on classical Egypt or the Old Masters. "If I do a show like this one that upsets the docents,"Johnson says, "I know that I've got a good show."

Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein once drew, in his own blood, a portrait of Adolf Hitler, shocking his teachers and getting himself booted out of art school. Forty years later he's more of an art star than an outlaw, but his work still has the power to shock.

A new exhibit called "The Child,'' through Nov. 28 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, presents images of distressed, wounded or threatened children, a topic that has fascinated Helnwein for years.

Helnwein first painted wounded children in the early 1970s and is well aware of how disturbing it can be to see children in states of peril. "Showing someone who is wounded, when it's a child, is more intense,"he said during a press tour of the show at the Legion last week. "Hardly anyone can be unaffected."

A 55-year-old father of four, Helnwein sees himself as an artist with a message. "A big part of contemporary art is not connected to anything,"he said. "It's important for certain artists to respond to what's going on in present time."

Curator Robert Flynn Johnson believes it is appropriate to display art with a moral message. "Museums shouldn't be like Rip Van Winkle, in a state of catatonic sleep,"he says. "They should take on issues. Otherwise they will be seen just as a low-grade entertainment vehicle. We're not out to shock -- we're out to make people think."

Museum officials have posted notices in the museum lobby and outside the gallery to warn people that viewer discretion is advised.

Ever since Helnwein painted the image of Hitler in blood, Nazis have been a running theme in his work. They appear in the three "Epiphany" paintings in the current show. "Epiphany I (Adoration of the Magi)," from 1996, offers a startling mix of past and present: Classical images of the Madonna and Child, photos of Nazis, black-and-white newspapers and newsreels and the stark lighting associated with film noir.

The painting shows a movie-star-beautiful Aryan mother, eyes averted, proudly displaying her chubby child. A group of gathered Nazis look on reverentially, caps doffed, reminding us of the horrors involved in idealizing genetic perfection.

Another unforgettable series, "Angel Sleeping," consists of enormous paintings of fetuses, based on stillborn fetuses about two hundred years old, housed in a medical academy in Vienna. The catalog shows the paintings installed in the atrium and alcoves of a cathedral in Austria, where they look positively unearthly.

Helnwein also is known for his installations. In 1988, on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht (the pogrom often said to mark the beginning of the Nazi Holocaust), he photographed German children and blew each image up to about 12 feet. He named the piece ``Selektion,'' evoking the horror of the Nazis selecting those who would live or die.

The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein

drawings, paintings and photographs

Where: the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 100 34th Ave., San Francisco

QUOTES

GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN

"You can't show anyone anything he hasn't seen already, on some level - any more than you can tell anyone anything he doesn't already know. It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.

Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition."

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)

"Helnwein is one of the few exciting painters we have today."

Norman Mailer

Writer

"For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but a mission. 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.

Robert Flynn Johnson

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it.

I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does.

Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas. A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this. This level of work is earned.

As an artist my strongest reaction to Helnwein's work is that it challenges me to be better at what I do. There are very few people that achieve utter excellence in what they do. And I think that Gottfried Helnwein is certainly one of those people."

Sean Penn

Actor, Director

"Warhol is the pre-Helnwein ... "

Dieter Ronte

Director, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna

"If anyone from Austrian Fine Art of the last fifty years could be called a star, then there is only one person who meets all the criteria: Gottfried Helnwein"

Stella Rollig

Director, Lentos Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Linz

"Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.

But the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes."

Steven Winn

San Francisco Chronicle, Arts and Culture Critic

"Gottfried Helnwein is a brave virtuoso of versatility. In his work, he forces us to confront, via his visual wit, brio, and candor, the human face of violence and angst.

Helnwein's work prods us to react, yet not simply because it is "shocking". His main message in fact is: be brave. Be daring. And most importantly, be willing to confront even the darkest side of human nature - after all, it's something we cannot escape. "

Reena Jana

artcritic, Flash Art

"Gottfried Helnwein's paintings evoke complex layers of history and psychology. Working with extraordinary technical sophistication, Helnwein seamlessly fuses traditional craftsmanship and contemporary conceptual investigations."

Gary Garrels

Curator, Museum of Modern Art New York

"What Helnwein creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive. 'People are surprised', he says, when they discern that he doesn't seem insane."

Lynell George

Los Angeles Times

"Helnwein is a very fine artist and one sick motherfucker."

Robert Crumb

artist

"Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings. He has used Christian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence. Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think."

Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is still infused with an uneasy idealism. His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command large prices. Helnwein has the air of a veteran rock star and the lifestyle to match it."

Gerry McCarthy

The Sunday Times

" Helnwein is the next generation’s final ally, a skilled provocateur forcing us to confront the legacy we have bequeathed upon our children. Helnwein is our chronicler, our conscience, the antidote to our failing memories. He refuses to let us forget."

Colin Berry

Artweek, San Francisco

"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. But Kiefer and Helnwein's work are both informed by the personal experience of growing up in post-war German speaking countries...

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."

Mitchell Waxman

Jewish Journal, Los Angeles

"I'll never forget the sensation I had at the unveiling of Gottfried Helnwein's "Head of a Child" in the Russian Museum.

And not just because this enormous canvas (six metres in height, four in breadth), well-known from reproductions, seemed to operate in a whole new way in the real, quasi-monumental space of the museum's exhibition-hall, - I realised that I was looking at the inner content of this innovative picture from a whole new point of view. "

Alexander Borovsky

Curator for Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

"Is it sheer coincidence that Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian artist, created a portrait of both the German and the American? Coincidence, that he captured Warhol as a disturbing spectre on photograph, but painted Beuys?

And that he then photographed the painted portrait of Beuys in the hands of Arno Breker, Adolf Hitler's favourite sculptor?

There are weighty reasons for considering Helnwein the legitimate heir to Beuys and Warhol."

Klaus Honnef

Curator for Photography, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn

"Helnwein's work is perfectly executed proof of the mastery of all the available means to outdo the reality in depiction.

Only in this way was Helnwein able to trigger the shock that he intended, a shock with a possible healing effect.

Helnwein developed a visual language depicting apocalyptic visions that can be understood all over the world. The beautiful and the ugly, the fear of the terrible and the power of its fascination, the clearly recognisable and that which cannot be interpreted but lurks outside the painting as well as outside the nursery door, and more closely intertwined in these pictures than those of any other living artist."

Peter Zawrel

Director, Museum of Lower Austria

"The Viennese Helnwein is part of a tradition going back to the 18th century, to which Messerschmidt's grimacing sculptures also belong, on which one of Freud's pupils wrote a long treatise.

One sees, too, the common ground of these works with those of Arnulf Rainer or Nitsch, 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."

Roland Recht

Chief Curator of Museums, Strasbourg

"Scale is an important part of his strategy because, he wants to engage with the widest possible public. To this end, transgression is also central.

An extremely impressive work "Selection", made in 1988, consisted of a series of uniform, huge images of children's faces, stretching from Cologne's Ludwig Museum to its cathedral. The subtitle, (Ninth November Night), gave the clue to the event the work marked - the start of the Holocaust on Reichskristallnacht, November 9, 1938.

The real horror, as his work reiterates, is indifference and complacency.

Aidan Dunne

art critic, The Irish Times

"Gottfried Helnwein's self-portraits in his "Black Mirror" series reach far beyond the boundaries of the ordinary self-portrait. They reflect the inner wants and desperation which lies within the viewer's own self. Helnwein points out the new form of the modern self-portrait which involves the creator and viewer alike."

Toshiharu Ito

critic, art-historian, professor at Tama Art Univ, Tokyo

"An alternative title to 'Angels Sleeping' for this exhibition could be “All Hail to the Wounded Child,” as many of the works center on irreparably wounded children (both externally and internally) as the innocent victims of war. The children in Helnwein’s works may also represent the lost or destroyed child in all of us, not only as victims of war, but as victims of modern society, with all its mindless violence and perverse attraction to aggressive mobs and disturbances. If there were a soundtrack to this exhibition, it would be a long, endless scream."

Tony Ozuna

The Prague Post

"Your paintings have left a deep impact on me.

To be honest - they have shocked me.

I have thought about it for a long time and came finally to the conclusion, that people should be confronted with these images to be inspired to think."

Elisabeth Gehrer

Austrian minister for education and culture

"Gottfried Helnwein is my mentor - on any artistic thing I've done.

His fight for expression and stance against oppression are reasons why I chose him as an artistic partner. An artist that doesn't provoke will be invisible. Art that doesn't cause strong emotions has no meaning. Helnwein has that internalized."

Marilyn Manson

musician, artist

QUOTES ABOUT HELNWEIN:

http://www.helnwein.com/kuenstler/zitate/abstracts_1.html