Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1978. Photo / Gerd Ludwig
Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1978. Photo / Gerd Ludwig
An extract from his book about artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Andreas Hirsch looks at beautiful paths along the spirals of life
In the seventh decade of his life, the artist had created for himself an even deeper place of seclusion at his Bay of Islands residence, this very sheltering cave ofwhich he had dreamed in his childhood and youth.
Mountain Hut, 1995. The Mountain Hut is cut into the slope of the hill so three quarters of the height of the back of the hut is the natural clay earth.
His mother had ordered the 6-year-old to lie flat on the floor in their apartment in the Nibelungenviertel in Vienna to avoid the danger of being hit by a projectile during the so-called February Fights of 1934 — the suppression of a socialist revolt by the Austro-Fascist dictatorship of the time. During World War II and under National Socialist dictatorship, Hundertwasser protected his Jewish mother by wearing his Aryan father's war medal and marching with the Hitler Youth. During the years of the Allied occupation of Austria from 1945 onwards, people in the parts of the city controlled by the Soviet Army, in which Hundertwasser and his mother lived, feared deportation to Siberian forced labour camps. In all these years, the youthful Hundertwasser had longed for such an underground hiding place, a safe cave: "I … would enjoy living underground … if tanks started rolling again, I would be protected in my cave."
The Pigsty, Kaurinui Valley, 1994/95. Photo / Richard Smart
Hundertwasser's mother, Elsa Stowasser, had advised her son to choose an inconspicuous life in order to be able to live safely and unmolested. Hundertwasser did not follow her advice and instead appeared in public internationally, provoking and attracting hostility, but also receiving much admiration and much envy in view of his huge success. In his last years at Kaurinui, the Mountain Hut became his preferred retreat, to which he hiked almost every day. In April 1996 he had a wayside shrine erected on the path to the Mountain Hut. The "wayside shrine" is an object of rural folk piety from the Christian culture of Hundertwasser's Austrian homeland, a small religious monument by the wayside dedicated to a saint, with a painted devotional picture. Hundertwasser's Wayside Shrine contained an icon of St Nicholas of Myra, who was Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor in the fourth century. His Greek name, Nikolaos, means "people's victory" and in traditions still active today he appears as the messenger or deliverer of gifts. Hundertwasser, whose bearded appearance over the years increasingly resembled the appearance of saints on Byzantine icons, strongly advocated the empowerment of the people for creative action and the shaping of their own sphere of life, and understood his art and his buildings as gifts to humanity.
The Big Way, 1955.
The Small Way, 1991.
Gallerist Hertha Dabbert, who organised Hundertwasser's exhibition series in New Zealand in 1973, was reminded of a saintly figure when she first met the artist in rural Bavaria in 1971. The Wayside Shrine on Hundertwasser's path to the Mountain Hut transferred a Catholic wayside shrine from alpine Austria to New Zealand, then combined it with a Russian Orthodox icon and supplemented it with "writings and vessels of a Japanese tea ritual". In this arrangement, Robert Fleck recognised an artistic strategy of "deterritorialisation" that is typical of Hundertwasser's dealings with a wide variety of cultural influences and characterises his design measures at Kaurinui. Hundertwasser's ship, Regentag, originally a salt freighter from Sicily, as well as the motorboat La Giudecca, which was brought to the Bay of Islands from Italy in 1996, are among these influences. Hundertwasser took trips in La Giudecca to the island of Urupukapuka, which has a rich flora and fauna, including the evergreen pōhutukawa tree. In Māori mythology a pōhutukawa at Cape Reinga at the top of the North Island marks the point of departure to Hawaiki, the mythical home of their ancestors, for the spirits of those who have passed away and look back on Aotearoa one last time.
Hundertwasser in New Zealand
Edited extract from Hundertwasser in New Zealand, by Andreas J. Hirsch (Oratia Books, $70). Out on August 16.
