The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland challenged renowned artists to make imaginary album covers for their favorite musicians. The exhibit, on display at the Rock Hall through the fall, includes cover art for everyone from Dylan to Tupac, the Kinks to Foo Fighters.
Austrian multimedia artist Gottfried Helnwein worked with Manson to create this piece. "You can have many Interpretations of the relationship between Manson and the Child", says Helnwein. "I think the contrast is nice." ...

No less eerie is Gottfried Helnwein's American Prayer, a painting of a boy praying, not to the God of the Bible, but to Donald Duck. A closer look reveals that his hands and other appendages have mechanical joints, so this child is really a marionette, a Pinocchio invoking the Disney deities. ...

Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's huge photorealist painting of a Pinocchio-like half boy/half puppet praying to a levitating vision of Donald Duck is fabulous -- Durer meets Disney. ...

And what of the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"? Constance Bennett sang it in the 1933 musical version of the movie "Moulin Rouge." I don't think I've heard the song in 40 years. Jazz pianist and vocalist Diana Krall has a highly regarded revival in her 1995 "All for You" album.
Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein used the title for his parody of Edward Hopper's 1942 painting "Nighthawks," substituting James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley for Hopper's isolated diner patrons. Krall told interviewer Vivien Goldman that when she was a kid she had a reproduction of Helnwein's painting on her wall. ...

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NYROCK:
What were the reactions to the work you created together? Some of the photos are a bit unsettling....
MANSON:
It was funny; we released some of the photos without commenting what they were or what we intended to do with them – if they were the cover for The Golden Age of Grotesque or not. Not even our record company knew what they were for. They assumed they were for the cover artwork and got quite angry, "What the fuck should we do with this cover?!?" So I told them not to worry about it; it's not the cover and showed them the one with the Mickey Mouse ears. It freaked them out even more. But that's how I deal with people who think they're the portraits of authority. ...

Spin: What is this "Grotesk Burlesk" thing you are doing in Los Angeles?
Manson: That’s something I want to do in as many places as possible. We’re going to display collaborative work I’ve done with artist Gottfried Helnwein- large multimedia images. There is my painting. There are giant absinthe glasses with women inside them and conjoined twins and black elephants. Whatever I can find, really. And then there’s the music. I’m trying to leave people with a piece of my brain. ...

"High above Marlene Dietrich Blvd. in the city of Berlin, the sun smoldered below the concrete gutter sky like a cigarette burn in a stained bedsheet. How Edgar Allen Poetic. We set forth to the Dome of Berlin at dusk and I felt like I was in my own painting, "The Death of Art." Helnwein and I created a living installation with two disabled nude women as families stopped their picnics to stare. Of course we documented this for future viewing. But it didn't begin there... ...

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The Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein is well aware of the discomfort the public feels when confronted with images of children not represented as innocents but to whom a powerful sexual identity (and an awareness) is designated. In his work, and especially his paper drawings, he has created some of the most powerful and disturbing representations of abused childhood in history of art. We are not talking about the form of abuse commonly described in the penal code. By altering or removing the inbred pulsation that spurs us to stubbornly refuse or deny what we do not recognise, the manipulations and interferences (The Intrusion) adults perform on the social body of childhood are denounced. ...

If you are already familiar with Gottfried Helnwein then you proably knew more than I do about art, and I apologize on behalf of the commercially saturated masses.
Helnwein is a ridiculously talented artist. That is basically all you need to know. Anything you could imagine art doing for you, or to you, any feeling it might instill in you or emotion it might remove from you, he captures, then cripples, reformats, and pastes into the cleft pallet of a 20-foot-tall gray-scale rendition of a deformed fetus soaking in formaldehyde.
The essence of realism and ability that every art major ever clamored to grasp, he manages to expel onto canvas with apparent ease. He produces paintings, and photographs that you can't help but wish you could recreate with the same vision, depth, and intrigue. His art is without gimmick and his persona is without persona.
Helnwein is simply someone who enjoys creating, and has been doing a pretty damn good job at it for 35 years. ...

"Kleines Helnwein" is a play written and directedby the Argentinian poet Rodrigo M. Malmsten.
Inspired and based on the early paintings of Gottfried Helnwein
First performance: Teatro San Martin, Buenos Aires, 2000
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Autor: Rodrigo M. Malmsten
Actuan: Martín Von Tumpling, Belén Blanco
Iluminación: Alejandro Le Roux
Música: Mariano Durand, Marcelo Vignolo
Producción: Julieta Almada
Dirección: Rodrigo M. Malmsten
Esta obra formó parte del evento: III Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires ...

We have seen something of the 'look' created via Manson's collaboration with artist Gottfried Helnwein -
While the Album remains a sealed box in musical terms, Manson will wax lyrical about the inspirations and influences that helped shape it. There are the people - as well as Calloway, he nods to Oscar Wilde and the loose collective of radical artists and agents provocateurs - collaborator Helnwein among them - who were dubbed the Viennese Actionists.
" The Grotesque Burlesque takes what we've done in the past and brings it to a completely different level. This is making everyone a part of your creation. It's realising that art is more than music, more than people listen to it, more than people who play it - it is the combination of all that.
Gottfried Helnwein is someone who knows how to artfully provoke. He would take some of his creations and he'd bring them out into the streets. It became an instance where people wouldn't know what was the show and what wasn't the show. That's such a beautiful thing. It's like being in the playground - you're not really sure who's on what team, or what the real objective is. ...

Art critic Klaus Honnef lauded Helnwein as "the legitimate air to Beuys and Warhol, " highlighting his ability to defy the artistic boundaries of the social and political realm."
After posing for a photographic portrait in 1990, William Burroughs said of Helnwein’s work, " You can’t show anyone anything he hasn’t seen already, on some level any more than you can tell anyone anything he doesn’t already know. It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition to show the viewer what he knows but does not know what he knows. Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition. ...

Outside the Osbournes’ mansion last week, Manson and modernist Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein premiered two paintings from a collection that will be used as The Golden Age Of Grotesque’s artwork and will travel with the singer. Inspired by the glamour of 1930s Hollywood, the grotesque of vaudeville and the erotic art movement in Weimar Berlin, the pieces are disturbing portraits of Manson wearing the classic Mickey Mouse ears hat.
"This is an image of innocence and an image of childish nightmares," Manson explained. "This is, to me, growing up in America, what I saw in entertainment and the contrasting extremes of beauty and ugliness. ...

Outside the Osbournes' mansion last week, Manson and modernist Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein premiered two paintings from a collection that will be used as The Golden Age of Grotesque's artwork and will travel with the singer. Inspired by the glamour of 1930s Hollywood, the grotesque of vaudeville and the erotic art movement in Weimar Berlin, the pieces are disturbing portraits of Manson wearing the classic Mickey Mouse ears hat.
"This is an image of innocence and an image of childish nightmares," Manson explained. "This is, to me, growing up in America, what I saw in entertainment and the contrasting extremes of beauty and ugliness. ...

"Kids and guns is a big issue in society today, especially in America," explains Helnwein," One aspect of these pictures refers to the Columbine High School shootings, when Manson was blamed. And now the whole country is going to war. America worships guns. Every day you hear of child abuse. There are these cases with the Roman Catholic church. We're living in a crazy society. I believe a true artist will always reflect the state society is in." ...

Gottfried Helnwein's extensive 1997 retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg gave visitors an overview of his work going back to his street actions in Vienna in the 1970s, his grimacing iconic self-portraits that suggest self-mutilation, and on to his menacing canvases depicting the evils of the Third Reich.
He has worked as a painter. draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor and performance artist. His work is consistently concerned with psychological anxiety.
In his new series of paintings, done in somber monochrome blues, he continues to work with singulae sense of suspense and mystery. ...

 
Although cartoons and caricatures have played an important role in Western culture since the Middle Ages, the development of the comic strip and comic books are a unique American phenomenon and has contributed significantly to American visual culture.
...Gottfried Helnwein's "American Prayer," which is a large hyper-realistic painting of a boy kneeling in bedtime prayer to a large and looming Donald Duck.
About Helnwein's piece: Clark says, "In many ways, this is the signature piece for this whole show, because it shows how cartoon imagery has entered our culture, our world, our daily life." ...

(Illustrated Books).
Publishers Weekly; January 27, 2003
... paintings of Braque, Dali and Degas, and even an occasional piece of sculpture. Baudelaire's "Giantess" mirrors Gottfried Helnwein' s Lulu, a giantess in garters--other juxtapositions are more of an artistic stretch. As a stimulus to sexual reflection ... ...