Letter by Wieland Schmied to Hundertwasser
Dear Hundertwasser, dear Friend,
I am writing this letter after I read your speech of May 14, 1981, on the occasion of the Austrian State Award ceremony twice, attentively and quietly—as I do with everything coming from you. I feel obligated to respond immediately and I hope you find the time to read what I want to tell you equally attentively and quietly, and perhaps to answer me too. I am writing as your friend who has known you and your work for more than thirty years, who has followed your career (and partly accompanied it), who loves your paintings, and who takes seriously what you paint, what you do, what you say.
When I read your speech I was touched by it and happy, and at the same time distraught and stricken by it. I frankly want to tell you that. And I want to give you reasons for it. I feel I owe it to you as a friend. I was extremely touched and happy about the thoughts which you expressed in the first and second third of your speech (which you have often expressed in one or another form already earlier and, because necessary, you will repeat in the future). I know these thoughts and I share them for the most part, because I know the feelings and emotions behind them and I share them. I have been familiar with them for a long time, I am happy to see and read them again—because it is so necessary to formulate them again and again—and also, because new arguments, new examples, new formulations are always being added.
Your conviction, your battle for a better, more beautiful, healthier world—this message of yours is important. I shall support it according to my abilities and possibilities where ever I can. I shall stand up for it, disseminate and interpret it, so that it reaches many people. Your conviction is as important as your art. It is as much part of your work as it is an expression of your conviction. It cannot be separated. It belongs together. It is you, Hundertwasser. But I was shocked and dismayed about what you said in the last third, where you spoke about the development of modern art, about the avant-garde, about the artists and critics of today.
Here I no longer recognize you. Here I do not find the Hundertwasser, whom I know and love. Here I seem to see someone who is blind—who wants to blind himself or who is being blinded. Here I have to oppose you, because you are contradicting yourself, your beginnings in Paris, your beginnings in the avant-garde, your beginnings as a modern artist. Here I must oppose you, because in parts of your speech I hear the voice of the narrow-minded petty bourgeois, whom you have always despised. Because I hear the voice of backbiting against what is foreign to you. And because I think that petty bourgeoisie and backbiting is not worthy of you as I know you and as I hold you in regard.
In 1959 you painted a picture, »Homage to Tachism«. It is one of your most beautiful, one of your deepest paintings. You painted it although you were not a Tachist—or because you were not a Tachist. It was an homage to the others who took another path. To the others who perhaps are your opponents, but not your enemies. To the others whom you perhaps do not understand, but whom you nevertheless observed from a distance with that kind of sympathy with which we ought to meet all the living. Looking at the others who took another path you verified your path through theirs. You measured your strength against theirs. You thrived on them. That was an achievement which impressed me. It is an image of you that will remain. How can you say contemporary art is degenerate? Is a horror show? Think of the works of Joseph Beuys and Mario Merz, of Paolini and Gironcoli, of Rainer and Pichler and … and … and … Are they all exceptions? Whom then do you mean?
But even where contemporary art expresses some of the horror of which the world is full, it does it for reasons of truth, showing what human beings can do to human beings; it accuses inhumanity; it takes a stance. Just as you are searching the positive utopia of an earthly paradise in your paintings, some contemporary artists are warningly, accusingly, desperately showing a destroyed and destructive world, an earthly inferno. It was always like that in art history. Bosch und Brueghel whom you love did it hundreds of years ago. Dix and Grosz and Schlichter and Hubbuch did it in the 1920s. Other critical realists like Hrdlicka do it today. We should be grateful to them.
It was always a petty prejudice of the petty bourgeois, who wanted to be left undisturbed, to hold the artists responsible for the horror which we all (not just the politicians whom we have elected) are responsible for. The artists show realistically what they have seen in this world—describing like visionaries what appears in front of their inner eye (as Ensor, as Kubin did in their early years). The visions artists have today are even bleaker. These visions ought to warn us. We ought to come to our senses through them—not condemn the artists who confront us with them. We ought to listen to their Cassandra warnings—and not try to silence their voices.
But art today not only wants to warn us. From Kurt Schwitters to the Arte Povera it wants to sensitize us for values hidden in the low, in the seemingly meaningless, for instance in garbage. May I remind you that you yourself in 1952 created a wonderful work from garbage entitled the »Die Werte der Straße« [The Values of the Street]; you wanted to discover values that are ordinarily overlooked or not valued by stringing together discarded candy papers and empty cigarette boxes etc. Do you remember? You looked at the lowest objects, even a crumbling wall or the dirty sidewalk, ready to discover something. Have you lost this sensibility? It was part of your being, your work, and it still belongs to my image of Hundertwasser.
In the past two decades, art has tried to cross the borderline between art and life in many ways and with many strategies: happening and performance, individual mythology and securing of evidence, Conceptual Art and as an antipode Land-Art, Minimal Art and, as yet another antipode, Body art were and are such paths of becoming aware of ourselves, of becoming conscious, of dropping out of the constraints of our existences, of finding ourselves and of eventually changing our lives. They are no longer your ways. You took this way before them, took it in the 1940s and 50s, and you have reached your goal. Why do you want to condemn those who come behind you, who take a different, but comparable path to find themselves?
When I look at your work from that time: the completely over-painted arm chair, your sweater, the painted car, which all received œuvre numbers in your catalogue raisonné as a sign that you took them completely serious; finally your catalogue raisonné, which I consider a work of art in its own right—I see you as the legitimate (and far to little appreciated) forerunner of many directions which emerged since the 1960s and 70s. For me your catalogue raisonné represents your life as work—as do your diaries, your boat Rainday, your forest and your meadows, your hills and your mangrove swamp in New Zealand, for they are a kind of avowal as much as your early actions—the stinging nettle action, the infinite line, the speeches in the nude—were statements. Have you forgotten all that? Do you want to deny yourself like the later de Chirico denied his early metaphysical paintings when he was old and satisfied and tired?
I ask myself: how deeply must you have been hurt by stupid, naive and vicious articles which were directed against you, your œuvre, your avowal, and which tried to drag everything in the mud, that you hit back so blindly across-the-board, undifferentiated, and hit and hurt even your friends? You speak about the »vanguard idiot«. But this vanguard idiot—the creative artist of the 1960s and 70s—should and must be your natural ally! For whereever I look in Germany, in Italy, in France, it is the vanguard artists who get involved in ecology wherever they can—from Beuys to Rinke to H. A. SchultBeuys even established a party for that matter and leads the election campaign for the Green Party, opposing nuclear power passionately. Don’t you know all this? Don’t you see this? Or do you simply close your eyes and do not want to see it? Have your eyes become tired?
For me you stood — and still stand — in this avant-garde for which art and life are one, which addresses human beings and does not pursue art for art’s sake, which knows that the ecological question is a matter of survival for humanity. I believe that today all vanguard artists understand and express it in their works, if one can see it, and some of them represent it expressively with their words or in their writings. Without this engagement of the avant-garde, which reaches the awareness of the critical intellectuals in particular, the ecological question, the awareness of nature, her balance, her cycles, her resources which we ought not to destroy, would be much worse.
Those who oppose and condemn the avant-garde today, because it has become too difficult, too unintelligible, too inconvenient—will they not perhaps oppose ecology with its problems and demands tomorrow, because it becomes too uncomfortable, because it is more convenient to claim more and more new energy sources in order to continue to live in great wastefulness and with all the artificial needs as before? Those who condemn art today because it demands too much and appears too complex, will condemn ecology tomorrow, because it too demands too much and has consequences. Do not be deceived: it is only a small astute minority who has understood the questions of ecology correctly, who knows that we have indeed reached the limits of growth, that industrialization and nuclear power, water and air pollution, our interference into the balance of nature cannot continue… for the consequences are: limitation, moderation, relinquishment. And exactly this has been pointed out by avant-garde art in the last years… and has reached approximately the same astute minority of people as that of committed ecologists.
You speak about a mafia of museum people and gallery owners, art managers and art organizers, about frustrated intellectuals. I know the society which you address and I will certainly not glorify it. But neither it nor any other group of people should be vilified. I say this, because I know them, because I have no illusions about them, because I have experienced their faults and limits, because I have made my own mistakes and have experienced my own limits. All this is easily written about amidst the wonderful, intact, gorgeous nature in your Kaurinui Valley in the Bay of Islands. But it does not match reality. Again I have to say: do you remember how it was in the 1950s in Paris when you were in touch with Facchetti and Flinker, with Kamer and Raymond Cordier and all the others, with Restany and Jouffroy and the collectors … Was that really only a mafia? Perhaps it was for the outsider.
For those who were players it looked different, much more differentiated. Sure, they were all people with their own egoisms, with a longing for success (and perhaps wealth), but at the same time with a longing for knowledge and fulfillment of our existence … How can someone who really knows it condemn it across-the-board, condemn the human being across-the-board in all its humaneness, its ability and inability. Will he, who really knows this, condemn people in all their humaneness, ability and inability across-the-board? But only the unknowing, the outsider who assumes a conspiracy, a mafia at work everywhere … like the unknowing, the outsider, whether in Vienna or elsewhere in the nature paradise of the Waldviertel, envies you, Hundertwasser, as well and your extraordinary success, your wealth and therefore denigrates you, suspecting a Hundertwasser mafia, a Hundertwasser conspiracy behind it.
I remember having read in a Vienna newspaper once “Hundertwasser owes his success a manipulation of the international art market.” What nonsense! I was very angry about it, got very worked up about it and protested! The more saddened am I seeing that you have come down to that level, suspecting everyone across-the-board who are in touch with, even attacking the artists themselves who all fight the same battle, stand for the same ideals as you?
“Art is something religious”, you claim. Yes! But do you want to deny others that it is the same for them only because you have removed yourself from them? You know how different the religions of this earth are in their characteristics …I say all this to you, because the last part of your Vienna speech has shocked me. I feel attacked personally. But I say this to you for your own sake, for your aims and your ideals, for your love of nature, your love of trees and meadows which should help us to survive as human beings.
And I expect an answer from you. If there is anything left in you of the old Hundertwasser you will understand me. I know you are not interested in the fast applause of the citizens and the publicity of magazines, but you are serious about the subject. Therefore I wanted to tell you openly how unhappy I was about the conclusion of your Vienna speech. It seems to put in question everything that you otherwise say about the creative forces in human beings, about the right to windows and the obligation for trees and our life on earth which could be a paradise.
I greet you very cordially in old attachment,
Yours Wieland
P. S. You use the bad word “degenerate art.” It almost sounds as if you want to show solidarity with the Nazis. You should not move into their neighborhood. W.“
Letter by Wieland Schmied criticising Hundertwasser severely for his speech on the occasion of the awarding of the Grand Austrian State Prize for the Arts. Written 1981.
Published in:
Schurian, Walter (ed.): Hundertwasser – Schöne Wege, Gedanken über Kunst und Leben. (Beautiful Paths – Thoughts on Art and Life) Munich: Langen Müller Verlag, 2004, pp. 197-202 (German)