Austrian avant-garde artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser died on February 19th 2000 aboard the Queen Elisabeth II liner on his way back from New Zealand where he was residing during the winter months. Born in Vienna on december 15th 1928 Hundertwasser, whose real name was Friedrich Stowasser, was a major representative of Viennese contemporary art.
In the clean and quiet Austrian capital he was considered as “naughty boy” who loathed the straight line, which, in his view destroyed heaven and was a formidable supporter of ecology.
Hundertwasser travelled much during his career and lived for a while in Paris where he exhibited his works for the first time in 1954 at the Paul Facchetti gallery and the last at the Galerie Trigano last year. It was also in Paris that he published in the “Cimaise” magazine his first manifesto entitled “Visibility in the trans-automatic creation” , which was unreadable but much amusing. Four years later he published in 1958 the Mouldiness manifesto against rationalism in architecture and since then was calling to have trees planted on the roofs of buildings.
Hundertwasser founded in 1959 with Ernst Fuchs and Arnulf Rainer the “Pintorarium” free and Informal Academy, the only one he really frequented as his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna and at the school of Beaux-Arts in Paris only lasted three months and one day respectively.
He nevertheless taught at the Academy of Fine Arts of Hamburg in 1959 but caused scandal with his “endless line”, a work which started on one wall of his teaching class and went on to invade the whole building.
Hundertwasser took part in many exhibitions in France and abroad and was much admired in his native country. Still his paintings were always conceived via a political engagement as he militated in favour of peace in the Middle East, against nuclear programs in the U.S and for ecology in Austria.
In 1968, completely nude, he read a manifesto against Loos' architecture and sometimes some town officials cared to call on him to produce buildings which resembled those of Gaudi in Barcelona. His intervention on the tower of the incinerating factory of Vienna, something between a phallic symbolic and the towers of the kremlin, notably became one of the most incredible monuments of Vienna.
The artist inaugurated in 1991 the KunstHausWien, an extraordinary small museum with a polychrome and tormented façade and a wavy floor in the inside. The museum houses a permanent collection of works by Hundertwasser who was the inventor of a modern form of the Jugenstil and the representative of a friendly, peaceful and open-minded Austria.
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