Acclaimed artist sought simple life

By Karyn Scherer

They can't bury Frederick Hundertwasser in a conventional coffin. He didn't like straight lines. He detested them.

The Austrian-born artist, conservationist and philosopher spent his life campaigning against the "architectural rubbish of straight-line thinkers." He also made his thoughts on death well known. There was no better tombstone, he believed, than a tree.

In 1985, he obtained special permission from then Health Minister Aussie Malcolm to be buried in his adopted home of New Zealand, among the thousands of trees he planted on his 450ha property near Kawakawa.

Born Friedrich Stowasser in Vienna in 1928, he was one of only two members of his family to survive Nazi concentration camps. Deciding early to be an artist, he changed his name to Friedensreich Hundertwasser, German for "Kingdom of Peace, Hundred Waters."

His art, characterised by swirls and splashes of vivid colour, soon brought him to international attention.

A nomad who lived and worked in many countries, but who never turned his back on his birthplace, he often set out to visit somewhere and stayed several years.

Invited to New Zealand in 1973 by the director of the Auckland Art Gallery, Richard Teller-Hirsch, he eventually bought a hilly property near Kawakawa. A "greenie" before it became truly fashionable to be one, he spent several months of each year here, living in a converted milking shed with a grass roof and an organic toilet.

Although he probably didn't coin the phrase "sick building," he used it often, earning the nickname "the architecture doctor."

New Zealand offered him refuge from the international acclaim that will assure his reputation as one of the 20th century's most popular artists. In 1990, the New Zealand Government named him one of several "living treasures," but he was not entirely comfortable with the accolade.

"I came to New Zealand because partly it is a place where they just call me Frederick," he explained at the time.

He had his critics. To many of the art world's elite, he was less the emperor of ecology and more the king of kitsch - a poster-boy for those who don't know much about art but know what they like.

It was telling, his critics noted, that like many of his fans he had a copy of Gustav Klimt's ubiquitous The Kiss in one of his other homes, a 19th-century Venetian villa (that can count among its other famous residents Ernest Hemingway and Igor Stravinsky).

He once complained: "I am famous because my paintings are expensive and not so much because of what they are." He said he would like his art to be remembered as "an incentive for a creative world."

In the 1980s, he offered to design a building in Wellington, perhaps a museum or library. His version of what is now Te Papa was not accepted. Several other projects he tried to start for other towns and cities also never eventuated.

He did not regard it as unfortunate that his first - and what turned out to be his last - public building in the Southern Hemisphere was a toilet block in his beloved Kawakawa.

He has left many other monuments across the globe, including a school, restaurant, church, winery, thermal spa and giant incinerator. But it is probably a Viennese apartment complex known as Hundertwasser House that will remain his best-known creation.

You can take a virtual tour on the Internet but it's not the same as seeing it for yourself. For an architecture student, as I was, the experience was almost life-changing. To walk among its colourful, organic spaces, its uneven walls, floors and ceilings, its crazy paving and bulbous columns, was to be transported back to childhood, as he intended.

It proved that it was possible to create buildings unconstrained by the rules of commerce and convention, and it was comforting to learn that unlike many architectural masterpieces, its residents loved living there.

Kawakawa's toilets will undoubtedly become a shrine of sorts but New Zealanders have another memento of Hundertwasser: the green-and-white flag with a koru-like spiral which he designed in 1983 as a national emblem.

He also designed a "peace flag" which was offered to Middle East leaders in the hope that it might unite Arabs and Jews, and he later created a flag for Australia.

With his talents for graphic design he also created stamps, coins and posters for organisations such as the United Nations and Greenpeace.

The "koru flag," as many New Zealanders know it, can be hard to find these days but it is still being sold. I'm sure my parents were not alone in flying one half-mast at their Northland hideaway this week.