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As Aotearoa New Zealand marks Conservation Week, starting today, artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Conservation Poster turns 50. Sarah Daniell on the tale of a taonga.
In 1973, Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser arrived in New Zealand and inadvertently changed our art scene forever. Less than a year after he arrived, he created one of our most well-recognised images: A 1974 Conservation Week promotional poster that, had it been created this year, would still be regarded as a rich and layered reflection on nature.
A singular work, it was both a call to action and a love story for the artist, and quickly became iconic and collectible. As it turns 50, it remains significant.
How it came to be is an odyssey starting at Rakino Island, in the Hauraki Gulf, and crossing oceans to New York, the Mediterranean, Venice and eventually Austria.
It was the first Hundertwasser created to support an environmental campaign, says Joost de Bruin, director of the Hundertwasser Art Centre in Whangarei. The poster was important for Hundertwasser himself, not just in terms of his arrival in New Zealand, says de Bruin.
“Because it was so successful he did posters for other conservation issues. It created a whole series of posters for global environmental initiatives. He thought, ‘This is a medium I can use to reach a mass audience,’ and he did that more often subsequent to our poster.”
A portrait of the artist as a prescient force of nature, then.
According to a 1974 Listener story, there were 10,000 copies produced of the poster in two sizes. Of those, 5000 were sold around the world and 5000 given to the Conservation Week Committee. The larger ones sold for $5; the smaller for $3. Copies now sell for around $1000 at auction.
The work itself would influence not only the masses but those holding offices of influence. When Hundertwasser applied for New Zealand citizenship (he became a citizen in 1983), it was noted that he’d contributed something noble for the country.
“Hundertwasser received an award, a citation from the Nature Conservation Council, and he made a significant donation to the cause of conservation within New Zealand,” says de Bruin. “I think that meant a lot to him and played a part in his decision to make New Zealand his home, or one of his homes.”
De Bruin says the artist took a very long time to make a work – Hundertwasser himself said his process was “slow” and “vegetative”.
“He started working on the poster on Rakino Island. I don’t know how he ended up there, but it was September 1973 - his first year here. He spent a little bit of time there but didn’t finish it there. He worked on it on board Regentag [”Rainy Day”, the historic wooden ketch he restored and sailed in the Mediterranean before sailing to New Zealand]. He took it to several countries to complete before he actually finished it. And then it was converted into a poster after that.”
How Hundertwasser came to Aotearoa is seeded in stories his mother, Elsa, told him as a small boy in Austria. “He was always very preoccupied with people and nature,” says de Bruin. “But we know that Hundertwasser’s mother talked with him about New Zealand being this paradise on the other side of the world - beautiful nature, no war, the people are friendly. So, his visit in 1973 wasn’t a coincidence.”
Born Friedrich Stowasser, he grew up during World War II the son of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, who died shortly before he was born. Elsa and Friedrich posed as Christians, and she even had her son join the Hitler Youth movement, an act believed to have saved both their lives.
Hundertwasser did indeed find a kind of paradise when he arrived in New Zealand, says de Bruin.
“But he was also quite shocked driving around the country to see forestry and farming and how the land in general had been treated. So he became quite focused on conservation from that point. In some respects, he knew New Zealand was a clean, green paradise but in others it definitely wasn’t.”
Those stories told by his mother took root, but as Linda Tyler, art historian at the University of Auckland, explains, the dream of travelling to New Zealand became reality at the invitation of the then-director of Auckland City Art Gallery. Hundertwasser was invited in 1973 by Auckland City Art Gallery’s American director Richard Teller Hirsch, previously director of the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, who had seen his work in the US.
Hirsch wanted him to exhibit his work for the Auckland Festival. Hundertwasser took Australasia by storm. His exhibition toured both Australia and New Zealand with all 75,000 copies of the accompanying 97-page catalogue selling out. Says Tyler: “Richard Teller Hirsch, himself born in Berlin to Jewish parents, rhapsodises in his introduction to that publication how ‘Hundertwasser, man of many names, is a giver…We owe him much, this poet of the inner eye who knows how little blood sustains our fragile lives, has seen it split, and still denies that cruelty of life, condemned to die…Before his scintillations, his colour, enclosed in spectra of delight, we see the tragic acknowledged but, triumphantly, made precious gift in a refusal of despair.’”
Hundertwasser was delighted by the accolades for his work, says Tyler, and unsurprisingly found a foothold in New Zealand, an island nation surrounded by ocean. He had a minimal footprint, living at Kaurinui Creek in the Bay of Islands, planting trees, both natives and exotics, and walking the 9km to Kawakawa for his groceries.
“He was never a big noter,” says Tyler. “He had a low impact lifestyle. He didn’t zoom around in a Mercedes or anything. He had a huge connection with the indigenous people of the Far North and to the land.”
The Nature Conservation Council, an advisory group to the Lands and Survey Department that commissioned the poster, was “on to him,” says Tyler. “They recognised he was into reforestation.”
Years later, in 1987, Hundertwasser was asked by Wellington mayor James Belich to create a waterfront art gallery and monument for the city. There is a model of his proposal in the Hundertwasser Art Centre in Whāngarei.
“Te Papa Tongarewa - what it is now - could have been a Hundertwasser building,” says de Bruin.
“That was never built, unfortunately; the mayor decided there should be a competition for the design. Hundertwasser withdrew his design because he didn’t want to participate in a competition with other architects.
“He was definitely ahead of his time. He was thinking about greening up cities way before anyone else was. He had photos of cities all around the world where there are more green spaces, including rooftops, and he had our building as an example. These days, it’s a very accepted thing.”
What is it about that 1974 image that’s so enduring? There is symmetry and symbolism to the many different geographical points informing a work that speaks to a very urgent and global issue 50 years after its creation. The message is still, if not more, powerful today.
“It’s not something didactic,” says Tyler. “The message is there, but it’s in quite a beautiful visual language. Hundertwasser is very accessible, so people really appreciate the amount of detail in his art. He often has overlays - that’s what people really appreciated. [The works] reward our looking.”
An artist is not often both lauded and populist, but Hundertwasser inhabited both worlds. “He was so clever at doing editions of prints,” says Tyler. “Huge editions - 300 copies of prints, and he signed them all. Reproductions were the easiest way people could have a Hundertwasser.
“But the actual oil painting that was the basis for the poster – that was way out of the league of most New Zealanders or galleries. There wasn’t the same dealer gallery culture as there is now. The market for his work was mostly overseas.”
The work, says Tyler, is ageless. “It really does span the generations - it’s as applicable today as it was when he made it. It’s every bit as important to be aware and think about the environment.”
Hundertwasser Art Centre with Wairau Māori Art Gallery has copies of the poster for sale. For a list of activities to mark Conservation Week, visit hundertwasserartcentre.co.nz/museumshop/
