Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein’s most important influences are Donald Duck and Jesus Christ
Kate Connolly
Walking along Cork Street in central London, trying to locate the Robert Sandelson Gallery, I do a double-take on seeing Mick Jagger standing at number 5a, gazing through its paneless window.
He has the 1970s hairstyle, carved cheeks and angular nose, arms folded and face expressionless as he observes the workmen labouring to reinsert the glass. The whole tableau recalls some contrived album cover. Except it isn’t Jagger, but one of his biggest fans, Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein.
It could have been worse. At least he doesn’t look like his self-portraits, in which bandages swathe his head, bent forks pull his mouth into a mocking smile, and blood drenches his torso.
Helnwein (52) is a master of the art of shocking. He earned his first gallery show in the 1970s by driving around his native Vienna dressed in Nazi uniform, his head bandaged, fake blood trickling from his mouth. It caught the eye of an art dealer who signed him up.
The decision to become an artist came to Helnwein “in a split second” at the age of 18, he says. “I saw it as the only way to find answers to the questions that no one in Austria would give me, such as why the postwar republic portrayed itself as the first victim of the Nazis rather than as one of the main perpetrators.”
He enrolled at the Experimental Institute for Higher Graphic Instruction in Vienna, but soon got bored. One day he took a razor blade and cut his palms, using the blood to paint a portrait of Adolf Hitler. The academics stormed in, confiscated the painting and Helnwein was expelled. “This was the moment when I sensed for the first time that you can change something with aesthetics. You can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the strong and powerful to slide and totter – anything, actually, if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means.”
He painted more Hitler portraits throughout the 1970s. They attracted attention from everyone, from concentration camp victims to SS officers. Neo-Nazis got to hear of his pictures, knocking at his studio door to say: “We’ve heard you have a painting of the Fhrer. Can we come in?”
According to Helnwein, they confided in him their dreams of German supremacy and told him how they were infiltrating the far-right Freedom Party.
Helnwein, who has lived in Ireland for the past three years, has clear opinions on Jrg Haider and his party’s rise to government; but he seems wary of being labelled as having an anti-Haider agenda. “I cannot understand why everyone makes so much fuss now,” he says. “The situation was far worse in the past, when the former Freedom Party leader [Friedrich Peter] was an SS soldier who had been involved in theEexterminations. Everyone knew about it and it was well- documented, but he always said, ‘I don’t remember,’ and everyone accepted that.”
But as with his Roman Catholic upbringing, it seems that Helnwein, who was born in 1948, will never escape the Nazi theme (in fact, he sees the two traditions as inextricably linked). Spurred into action by reading an interview in which Austria’s top court psychiatrist, Dr Heinrich Gross, admitted killing children at a Vienna paediatric unit during the war by poisoning their food, Helnwein painted Life Not Worth Living, a watercolour of a little girl “asleep” on the table, her head in her plate. The painting sparked a debate that finally led to Gross appearing in court last March. The judge ruled that he was mentally unfit to be tried.
Helnwein’s first solo show in Britain – which was on at the Robert Sandelson Gallery until JuneE14 – consisted largely of frail and tender formaldehyde- yellow or x-ray-blue images of pre-natal babies and children, reflecting the horror of the Nazi euthanasia programme, but brought close to the 21st century by the freshness of the Gross story.
The huge portraits have been reworked from deformed teratological images from Austria’s Anatomical Museum. Another exhibit, The Epiphany, shows Nazi soldiers inspecting a naked baby ”Jesus” who is held by a beautiful Aryan goddess. The widow of one of the Nazi officers is suing Helnwein for the unauthorised use of her husband’s image.
Children and child abuse have long been a central theme in Helnwein’s work. The images of seemingly innocent children in compromising positions, with a threatening look of experience in their eyes, have the ring of Mapplethorpe about them. He depicts not the act of violence, but, perhaps more disturbingly, the result of the violence.
According to Alexander Borowsky, the curator of contemporary art at the state Russian Museum in St Petersburg, comic books gave the teenage Helnwein his ”Damascus experience”. His allegiance to Walt Disney and youthful experience ofEarch-conservative Catholicism prompt him to describe Donald Duck and Jesus as the most important influences in his art.
“When I opened my first comic,” Helnwein says, “I felt like someone who has been buried in a mining accident and emerges into the daylight again after days in the dark. I was back home in a reasonable world where one could be flattened by road rollers or riddled with a hundred bullets without being harmed, a world where people looked decent once more.”