Gottfried Helnwein

Biography

In 1988, for the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a wall four metres high and a hundred metres long rose between the Museum Ludwig and Cologne Cathedral. On it, in an apparently endless row, stood huge pale children’s faces, most of them with closed eyes, lined up as if for a selection at a concentration camp. The first panel read “Selektion”; the last showed a diagram from an antisemitic textbook. A few days later unknown people slashed the portraits at throat level. The artist, Gottfried Helnwein, left the cuts in place and made them part of the display.

The work was called “Ninth November Night”.

He was born on 8 October 1948 in Vienna, the son of a post office employee, and grew up in a strict Catholic environment. Later he called that upbringing a catastrophe. His postwar childhood seemed to him gloomy, and what rescued him were the German-language Donald Duck comics his father brought home. Years later he liked to repeat that he had learned more from Donald Duck than from all the schools he attended. From 1965 to 1969 he studied at the Higher Federal Institution for Graphic Education and Experimentation in Vienna, and from 1969 to 1973 he studied painting at the University of Visual Art (the Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna, in the master class of Rudolf Hausner. Among his student awards are the Kardinal König Prize (1971) and the Theodor Körner Prize (1974). There is a story that at school he drew a portrait of Hitler in his own blood; the artist denied it in an interview in 2010.

His early works are hyperrealist watercolours of wounded children, along with photographs and actions in public space. From 1970 he made self-portraits in bandages, with surgical instruments on his face; the bandages later became almost the “uniform” of his self-portraits. Of the meaning of these pictures he said that he needed a living body to show the effect of violence on a defenceless victim, and that he himself was the most convenient model. In 1974, on Kärntner Straße in Vienna, he staged the action “White Children” with fifteen bandaged children. An exhibition at the Pressehaus gallery in 1972 closed after three days because of protests. A cover for the magazine Profil on suicide in Austria, showing a girl slitting her wrists, brought a flood of cancelled subscriptions in 1973. In 1979 he published in the same magazine the watercolour “Life Unworthy of Life”, showing a dead child collapsed over a plate, in response to an interview with the Viennese forensic physician Heinrich Gross, who was accused of killing children under the Nazis.

From the late 1970s Disney comic characters appeared in his paintings. A girl in a pink dress with a scar from mouth to ears and bandaged hands, clutching a comic book, is the watercolour “Peinlich” (“Embarrassing”). The British writer Julia Pascal wrote of it that it is as if Donald Duck had met Mengele. In 1982, at the request of the band Scorpions, his self-portrait as a screaming bandaged man, his eyes blinded by clamps, became the cover of the album Blackout. Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali posed for him, and his portrait of Kennedy made the cover of Time magazine on the twentieth anniversary of the president’s assassination.

In 1985 the Albertina in Vienna held his first major exhibition. Hausner proposed him as his successor as head of the master class, but most of the professors rejected the proposal. At the end of the year Helnwein left with his family for Germany and lived until 1997 in Burgbrohl castle in the Eifel. Monographs on him appeared in Europe, and in 1997 the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg gave him a retrospective. In the same year he moved to the south of Ireland and bought Castle Gurteen de la Poer in County Waterford, and in 2002 he opened a studio in Los Angeles. He received Irish citizenship in 2004.

The stage always interested him. In 1988 his poster for Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu”, in Peter Zadek’s production in Hamburg, caused a scandal and a criminal complaint; in the same year he worked with Johann Kresnik on “Macbeth”, which won a Berlin theatre prize. For the Los Angeles Opera he designed “Der Rosenkavalier” (directed by Maximilian Schell). In 2003 a joint project with Marilyn Manson, “The Golden Age of Grotesque”, began. For Rammstein he made the cover of the album Sehnsucht, which won a double platinum award. On that cover my eye, I think, lingers longer than on the paintings with Disney characters.

In 2004 the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco showed the exhibition “The Child” at the Legion of Honor: almost 130,000 visitors, and the local newspaper called it the most important exhibition of a contemporary artist that year. In 2013 the Albertina in Vienna opened his retrospective, which 250,000 people saw; for the museum this is a record for a living artist. In 2018 he covered the facade of a Viennese insurance company with an image of a blonde girl holding a machine gun, four thousand square metres in area. The dispute arose over its appeal against violence and war.