ART | Hundertwasser's Spirals for Peace

Antipode Island. Friedenreich Hundertwasser, 1975.

HUMANITARIA  |  HELO Magazine, September-October 2010

Today many around the world are either commemorating, celebrating, or ignoring the ninth anniversary of the September 11th attacks by al Qaeda on New York City and Washington, DC. Rather than offering yet another brown bag debate on global counter-terrorism, on Islamic world relations, or a eulogy for the dead, we at HELO decided instead that it was about time to bring you the long-promised essay on the revolutionary and contraversial artist for peace, Friedenreich Hundertwasser. 

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Hundertwasser (1928-2000) was a nudist, a naturalist, and a painter of spirals. He thought we should live in tree houses, abolish nuclear weapons, and restore the Dalai Lama. And he wasn't naive, he'd seen mass murder.

He was born Friedrich Stowasser in Austria in 1928, and served in the Nazi youth during the Second World War. Half-Jewish, he lost an aunt, grandmother, and dozens of relatives to the Nazi mass killing machine. In fact, his Jewish mother had ushered him into the Nazi Youth as cover, and it saved them. Once free of the war, he accused architects who championed strict observation of tradition and the segregation of styles, among others, as promoting a kind of destructive cultural Apartheid.

Why are all the windows Art Nouveau on this facade and all Baroque on this one, but if the two styles are mixed on one facade it is considered obscene? Hundertwasser asked. Does this not demonstrate how our thinking about common living reflects on how we act in society?

Hundertwasser rose in the 1950s and 1960s as a painter building a new surreal style inspired by fellow Austrians Gustav Klimt (1982-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918). His paintings (see highlights published here with permission from the Hundertwasser Archive in our Gallery) are largely meticulous experiments with earth-tones, sun-tones, and shadow used in spiral patterns based on a historic, cultural, or ecological theme. While "Blind Venus Inside Babel" depicts a shadowy woman stalking through a complex culturescape, "Island of Lost Desire" is an idyllic chair and table overlooking a gorgeous tree and coast.

While traveling the world to promote his painting, Hundertwasser visited Uganda, Sudan, and Senegal, and followed the troubling wars in the Middle East and escape of the Dalai Lama from Tibet. He painted a series of works offering a surreal take on the "Flight of the Dalai Lama" through the jungles of India, and of Tibet imagined without spiritual calm.

By the late 1960s and 1970s, Hundertwasser had moved his visual art from painting on canvass to painting on found objects, to wood carvings, to many media. But his new passions now that he had traveled and bought land for a new home in New Zealand became architecture and ecology.

He came out among cultural figures not only to accuse rule-hounds of preventing creativity in architectural style but also in every corner of life. He spoke publically, several times in the nude with assistants supporting his cause, about how humanity had made an error in believing society had to destroy or push nature out of the way in order to live; he argued quite the opposite.

He imagined a future in which humans lived within nature, houses integrated with trees, plumbing integrated with nature's soil chain, and so on, believing that it was a small group of humans' desire to destroy nature and regimentally divide and organize culture which promoted instability in society.

Hundertwasser wrote on Middle East peace and promoted a flag holding both the Star of David and the crescent moon of Islam. He created a poster for the Sarajevo Olympics envisioning it as an ideal example of integrated culture, not knowing Yugoslavia would fall to war. He supported Afghan carpet makers in the lead up and break out of the war and Soviet Invasion, long before it was fashionable to do so.

Most significantly, he spoke to students at universities to encourage them to see links between aspects of society which did not always seem to be linked. His painting, "Plant Trees Avert Nuclear Peril", was not a naive gesture but was meant to remind people to connect the dots from living creatively with nature as a means of changing destructive attitudes and practices.

The artist was one of the leading champions of the movement to use less - or potentially no - straight lines in architecture. It was meant again as a reminder that humans are healthiest when living creatively, when trying to solve problems with nature as opposed to avoiding problems and working against nature.

Hundertwasser died in 2000, just before al Qaeda's attack on New York and Washington DC and the dramatic revival of the Long War between Islamic extremism and the West. The spiralist, the nude professor, and the architect of the trees, Hundertwasser would probably have offered the most unusual design for a work or memorial to replace and commemorate the World Trade Center in New York.

Based on his ideas, it might have been two giant Sequoia trees planted in a swamp overflowing with nature and animal life. Perhaps a better way to act against extremism then any combination of fortified steel, cubicle maze, and social protest? 

HELO Magazine