April 3, 2022

Friedrich Hundertwasser was an Austrian artist. He was born in Vienna on December 15, 1928, as Friedrich Stowasser. His father, Ernst Stowasser, passed away the following year. Hundertwasser began drawing when he was six years old. He attended the Montessori School in Vienna for one year in 1936, where he received comments on his “unusual sense of color and form” on his report card. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany, he was forced to move into his aunt and grandmother’s home in Obere Donaustrasse. He began composing crayon drawings of nature in 1943; that same year, 69 of his Jewish relatives were deported and killed, including his aunt and grandmother.

In 1948, he spent three months at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Professor Robin Christian Anderson. He also began to be influenced by a Walter Kampmann exhibition in the Albertina and by Schiele exhibitions. In 1949, he traveled throughout Italy, including Northern Italy, Tuscany, Rome, Naples, Sicily, and Florence, where he met French artist Rene Bro and followed him to Paris. He developed his own style that same year and adopted the name Hundertwasser. By 1951, he became a member of the Art Club in Vienna and had his first exhibition at the club the following year. Hundertwasser had his first exhibition in Paris in 1954, at Studio Paul Facchetti. That September and October, he was hospitalized with jaundice in Ospedale Santo Spirito in Rome, where he painted many watercolors. 1954 is the also the same year that Hundertwasser invents transautomatism, which proposes that the viewer can see multiple different images within one artwork. Two years later, he published The Visibility of Transautomatic Creation in the Individual Transautomatic Cinema in Phases in Paris. He received several awards throughout his career, including the Sanbra Prize at the 5^th Sao Paulo Biennale in 1959 and the Mainichi Prize at the 6^th International Art Exhibition in Tokyo in 1961.

From 1969-1971, Hundertwasser composed the graphic work 686 Good Morning City-Bleeding Town “in 120 color variations.” In this version of the work, he juxtaposes warm tones and neutrals with fluorescent colors like lime green and pink. He includes a column of squares to the left of the composition to list the colors used. The work features abstracted buildings with slight curves covered in tiny windows, which are accentuated by Hundertwasser’s use of foil embossment. His unique color palette and building renderings showcase his “unusual use of color and form,” which goes back to his days at the Montessori School in Vienna. The buildings are interrupted by three circles: one at the top, one in the middle, and one at the bottom of the composition. These circles consist of layers of yellow, red, orange, and hints of pink and green. Hundertwasser sought “to overcome the chain production by the machine, to produce creative individuality and thereby going beyond machine reproduction” through his graphic art. Perhaps the circles he places over the buildings in Good Morning City-Bleeding Town are a visual device intended to create individuality, as they disrupt and challenge the modern production of the cityscape. His creative individuality is evident in his use of fluorescent colors as well, as you would not see vibrant buildings like these in your average city. These disruptions to everyday, modern forms may also reflect the disruptions Hundertwasser experienced in his own life: His forced removal from his home and the loss of his loved ones during the World War II dramatically changed life as he once knew it in his youth.

Written by Angela Athnasios

Source: hundertwasser.com

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