Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Biography

In 1949 a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna began signing his watercolours “Hundertwasser”. His real surname was Stowasser, and the “sto” in it sounded Slavic: he simply translated that syllable into German. By then he had already left the academy, having studied there, by some accounts, for about three months.

Friedrich Stowasser was born on 15 December 1928 in Vienna. His father, the engineer Ernst Stowasser, died when the boy was not yet two; his mother Elsa, who was of Jewish origin, raised him alone. In 1935 he was baptised a Catholic, and after the Anschluss he found himself in the Hitler Youth: this was how the family tried to avoid attention. Mother and son survived the Nazi years, partly because of this, while his grandmother and about seventy relatives died. He received no systematic art education. Later he said that the strongest impression of his youth was the Egon Schiele exhibition in Vienna in 1948, where the walls of houses were painted the way human skin is. He was also strongly influenced by Walter Kampmann, little known today, with his “animate” trees.

In 1949 Hundertwasser went to Italy for the first time, where he made friends with the French artist René Brô. In 1950 they travelled together as far as Paris; there were also Morocco, Tunisia and Sicily. He always carried a miniature paintbox so that he could paint anywhere. His first exhibitions were held in Vienna in 1952 and 1953, and in Paris at the Galerie Facchetti in 1954.

In 1953 the spiral appeared in his painting. It remained his main motif for the rest of his life. In 1954 he began numbering his works and keeping a file on each: materials, circumstances, fate. Where possible he prepared his paints himself, mixing egg tempera, sand, lime and crushed brick into them, and he avoided thick, impasto oil painting. Against the Paris Tachisme and “automatism” of the day he put forward his own idea, “transautomatism”, in which what matters is a new way of seeing and an active viewer. I do not know how seriously it was taken at the time, but the name stuck.

He first set out his ideas on architecture in manifestos. The “Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture” (1958) rejected the straight line and functionalism and demanded a “window right”: a tenant should be able to decorate the wall within arm’s reach of his window. In 1967 in Munich and in 1968 in Vienna he gave “nude speeches”; in the second he called for a boycott of architecture in the tradition of Adolf Loos. In 1972 came the manifesto “Your window right, your tree duty”.

In December 1959, as a visiting lecturer at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, he began drawing an “endless line” together with Bazon Brock and Herbert Schuldt: a spiral on the walls of the classroom, starting one centimetre above the floor and climbing upward. The head of the school stopped the action after two days, when the line had risen to about two and a half metres. In protest Hundertwasser gave up his post.

In 1961 in Japan he received the Mainichi Prize at the Sixth International Art Exhibition in Tokyo. The final form of his name dates from around this time: he built “Friedensreich” from his first name, writing it in Japanese characters for “peace” and “realm”. Japanese craftsmen cut and printed his colour woodcuts; he was the first European artist whose work was reproduced in this way. In 1962 a retrospective of his work was shown in the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and in 1964 there was a large exhibition in Hanover.

In 1972 he founded a company in Switzerland, through which he managed his copyrights. In 1973 he came to New Zealand for the first time, and then bought several plots in the Bay of Islands, the whole Kaurinui valley, about 372 hectares. There he planted more than a hundred thousand native trees, built ponds and plant-based water purification systems, used solar panels and a water wheel, and lived in an old farmhouse and in the “Bottle House” he had designed.

He began working as an architect after the age of fifty. In 1982 he decorated the façade of the Rosenthal factory in Selb, and in 1983 the foundation stone was laid for the house in Vienna on Löwengasse, handed over to its tenants on 17 February 1986. It was built to the designs of the architects Josef Krawina and Peter Pelikan, and the uneven floors, the trees in the windows and the grass on the roof were Hundertwasser’s ideas. The house became one of the main tourist sights of Vienna. Professional architects mostly rejected his buildings; the public liked them. Later came the Church of St Barbara in Bärnbach (1987–1988), the Kunsthaus in Vienna (opened in 1991), the Spittelau district heating plant, the thermal village in Bad Blumau, and the “Waldspirale” (Forest Spiral) in Darmstadt (1998–2000). He also designed postage stamps, flags and coins: in 1983 came his koru flag for New Zealand, based on the spiral motif.

Hundertwasser died on 19 February 2000 aboard the liner Queen Elizabeth 2 on a voyage from New Zealand to Europe. He was buried on 3 March 2000 on his own land in New Zealand, in the “Garden of the Happy Dead”, without a coffin, under a tulip tree.