Paintings

„My paintings are the harvest of my dreams“ Hundertwasser

„My painting is, I think, completely different because it is vegetative painting“ Hundertwasser

„Painting is a religious activity“ Hundertwasser

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97 THE MIRCULOUS DRAUGHT
In collaboration with René Brô
Mixed media
St. Mandé, 1950

In that time, I made a deal with Brô. Brô painted almond-shaped eyes high up in the face with nose, rivers and ship-mouth in circular-shaped heads. I painted soul-trees that means trees which had a halo of glory like human beings and saints. Trees where you could see through as if they were made out of spheres of glass. These trees I had seen in the drawings of Walter Kampmann. Brô gave me the right to paint his faces, and I gave Brô

the right to paint my "soul-trees".
Hundertwasser

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227 A RAINDROP WHICH FALLS INTO THE CITY
Watercolour
Paris, 1955

This watercolour is also one I folded in four parts and only painted one quarter at a time. It is like a continuation of the thought of pictures 153 and 154 Automobile with Red Raindrops, only now the raindrop is falling on a city - an appeal to a new urbanism in harmony with creation. The tachistically falling drop is meticulously depicted, or as I said later, Each raindrop is a kiss from heaven.
Hundertwasser

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460 HOMMAGE AU TACHISME
Mixed media
La Picaudière, 1961

To me the most honest form of Tachism was total self-renunciation: if a painter climbs up a ladder with a bucket of paint and shoots himself up there, letting the paint fall "automatically" onto the canvas waiting on the floor, that is the most sublime act of Tachistic self-renunciation. The canvas is like a jumping sheet, the paint sticks to it, the dead initiator falls through it. Painting blind- blindfolded - or drawing left-handed - when you're right-handed - are not so totally honest, and when you let snails, monkeys, donkey tails, elephant trunks do the painting, it is somebody else doing the work, albeit Tachistically correctly. With this picture I wanted to show very lucidly and immediately and precisely how a Tachistically fluidoid-spiraloid painting done in a state of complete awareness looks as if it were from a different viewpoint, a different time and world, when it is painted with the traditional method. I had great respect for Tachism, but as an outsider.
Hundertwasser

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583 TWO ENVELOPES ON A LONG VOYAGE
Watercolour
Hamburg, 1964

As so many times before, for example 188 The Parliamentary Content of an Arrow, 180 Steamer and Maelstrom in a Garden, 201 Shirt-sleeve Pattern, 581 The Impotent Krka Waterfalls, the irregular form of the edges of the painted surface is very significant, as it itself becomes an essential part of the picture. Unfolded letter envelopes, tailor's patterns can be used for nothing. You don't have to do anything in addition, otherwise the ready-made form is bad and implausible, and the contrast between the painted and the external form is ruined. The margin is like the skin. When I start painting, I don't know where to begin: from the edge towards the centre or from the centre towards the edge. - Let things take their own course.
Hundertwasser

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622 MOURNING SCHIELE
Mixed media
Lugano, 1965

I love Schiele, Picasso and Klee and their ilk, and Giotto, the old masters and the like. But in-between and besides them there is a yawning emptiness. The simple is still broad.

I often dream like Schiele, my father, about flowers that are red, and birds and flying fish and gardens in velvet and emerald green and human beings who walk, weeping, in red-yellow and ocean-blue. (from: I love Schiele, 1950/1951)

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839 LOEWENGASSE LA TROISIEME PEAU
Mixed media
Porquerolles, 1982

A Hundertwasser House architecture reverie. The project was in progress. Combining architecture and painting is difficult. I am reproached in architecture circles for just painting houses: it is all a Potemkin façade, i. e., flat, with nothing behind it. And at that I build in tandem with the architect Pelikan extremely varied, complicated houses full of nooks and crannies. It is on the contrary precisely the T-square-straight, soulless architectures which are flat and easy to analyse and construct with a computer. My houses - the computer people have said - often need more data input than medieval cathedrals.
Hundertwasser

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959 BURNING FACE
Mixed media
Wien, 1998

The picture is important to me because it is the only one done on a white ground - on canvas - which my mother prepared herself. She wanted to paint on it, but then she died. Then the prepared canvas was kicking around my place for years. After my mother tried at all costs to talk me out of taking up painting as my profession: that was a "starveling's trade", she later, at about age seventy, took up painting herself, I think to prove to me that she could paint, too, in the naive style of Grandma Moses, who, at a very advanced age, after a full life, began to paint in her retirement and became a sensation in the art world. Grandma Moses painted until she was over a hundred years old; my mother died at 87.
Hundertwasser