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Lot Essay
Looking at Friedensreich Hundertwasser's 1962 picture Haus im Wind (I), it is easy to see why he became known as the painters of spirals. Dominating the canvas is a swirling maze-like progression that creates a vortex, drawing our attention inwards, while a smaller spiral, bound within a square, is in one of the corners. This same motif was in force in Hundertwasser's one-man exhibition in the Austrian pavilion of the Venice Biennale that same year.
The opulence of Hundertwasser's pictures, which some critics related to the Jugendstil of his native Vienna embodied in the works of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, has flourished in Haus im Wind (I), resulting in an organic design that perfectly captures the essence of what the artist himself referred to as his 'vegetative painting.' This organic spiral is in stark and deliberate contrast to the linearity of the building behind it. Hundertwasser declared again and again during his career that he was opposed to the straight line, which he considered godless. It is the straight line, in science and architecture, that he felt was dragging humanity towards its destruction, forcing us away from Nature. In Haus im Wind (I), his spiral superimposed on the large building appears to be a form of exorcism, negating the rigidity of modern architecture.
This was a notion that Hundertwasser had embraced three years earlier when he had painted a spiral on the walls of his studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, condemning both the architecture of the space and the constraints of the education system. Architecture was of particular interest to Hundertwasser, who considered people to have three 'skins': firstly, that of the body, then our clothes, then our homes. Gradually, humanity had lost touch with that last layer and become trapped within artificial edifices that no longer embedded people in Nature. In his paintings, performances and indeed his own architectural plans, Hundertwasser sought to banish the straight lines and instead to create homes that were more organic and that allowed people to be enveloped once again in the environment, and it is this same desire that informs the graceful arabesques of Haus im Wind (I).
The opulence of Hundertwasser's pictures, which some critics related to the Jugendstil of his native Vienna embodied in the works of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, has flourished in Haus im Wind (I), resulting in an organic design that perfectly captures the essence of what the artist himself referred to as his 'vegetative painting.' This organic spiral is in stark and deliberate contrast to the linearity of the building behind it. Hundertwasser declared again and again during his career that he was opposed to the straight line, which he considered godless. It is the straight line, in science and architecture, that he felt was dragging humanity towards its destruction, forcing us away from Nature. In Haus im Wind (I), his spiral superimposed on the large building appears to be a form of exorcism, negating the rigidity of modern architecture.
This was a notion that Hundertwasser had embraced three years earlier when he had painted a spiral on the walls of his studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, condemning both the architecture of the space and the constraints of the education system. Architecture was of particular interest to Hundertwasser, who considered people to have three 'skins': firstly, that of the body, then our clothes, then our homes. Gradually, humanity had lost touch with that last layer and become trapped within artificial edifices that no longer embedded people in Nature. In his paintings, performances and indeed his own architectural plans, Hundertwasser sought to banish the straight lines and instead to create homes that were more organic and that allowed people to be enveloped once again in the environment, and it is this same desire that informs the graceful arabesques of Haus im Wind (I).