HELNWEIN: THE ARTIST AS PROVOCATEUR
By Peter Selz(Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, University of California, Berkeley. Former Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum.)1997This Essay was written for the catalogue of the Helnwein retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in 1997.
Gottfried Helnwein looks back at his education in a Catholic gymnasium as a catastrophe, and his goal has been largely to undermine and destroy the repressive system ... He completely despised and rejected the school system and his only desire was to paint. He abandoned school and was admitted to the Experimental Institute of Higher Graphic Instruction in 1965 — an institution that was anything but experimental; instruction proved to be traditional and conformist. In rebellion against these constraints, Helnwein cut his hand with a razor blade and with his own blood drew a picture of Adolf Hitler, which outraged the school administration and made the young artist aware for the first time of the potency of a picture. Soon thereafter he was dismissed from the school.
NAZI DREAMING
New Statesman, UKJulia Pascal10. April 2006
...Helnwein, then still a teenager, reacted by painting a portrait of Adolf Hitler that got him expelled from art school. His "crime" was to have reminded Austria of its best-known son.
Since then, Helnwein's work has often provoked howls of anger at home. In the early 1970s, he was part of the Wiener Aktionisten ("Vienna Activists"). These dissenters were the interface between street theatre, public art and political protest. They threatened Austria's collective amnesia. Most were either imprisoned or forced into exile. In 1971, protesters defaced his first public Aktion with stickers which, without a trace of irony, proclaimed the work as entartete Kunst - the Nazi term for degenerate art. The mayor of Vienna ordered the police to confiscate his canvases. A year later, another exhibition in Vienna closed prematurely after threats of local council strikes....