In His Own Words | Gottfried Helnwein

In His Own Words | Gottfried Helnwein

Four years ago, just before I moved downtown, I was invited to an art opening in the building where I live now. I’ll never forget the incredible feeling that came over me as I was catapulted into the mindand imagination of a true genius. I was literally in awe of the work I saw that night: larger than life images of blindfolded children walking through rivers of dead bodies, a woman holding her unclothed baby boy being examined by Nazi soldiers, a little girl lying asleep on her back; angelic and peaceful, while disfigured faced men stand over her like a science project. All so dark and disturbing yet in some strange way beautiful and familiar.

No matter how I try I don’t know if I could ever explain to you how moved I was that night and how humbled I was by the thought that I might live and work in the very same building with this brilliant artist. I soon came to realize that not only is Gottfried a brilliant artist, thinker, and philosopher, but a kind and gentle man as well, with one of the most beautiful families I have ever met. Recently I asked him if I could photograph and interview him for the ADC. He agreed. Following is part one of that conversation and the first of a series of many. I prey.

“I NEVER WANTED TO BECOME AN ARTIST. As a kid I never had that idea ‘I want to be an artist’. I was always good at drawing. I was very good. But my main goal as a kid was just to get out. I wanted to escape. I grew up in Vienna after the war. It was very depressing, it was really a dark and bleak place. In the beginning when I was a kid, the houses were bombed and everyone was miserable. Nobody really talked much—it was quiet. There was no music. Nobody sang. Nobody danced. There was a kind of a strange and sad nothingness.

I always thought as a kid, “I didn’t want to be here, I didn’t want to land here.” I didn’t feel related to anything or anybody. The only art I saw was in the churches. My family was very Roman Catholic and I was forced to go to church all the time where all I saw were murals of tortured people. I spent my childhood with the nuns and in the school with monks and nuns. The images that I saw in my childhood were all of tortured people, sacred corpses and people nailed against the wall-lots of blood. The description was always pain. God was a man with long hair bleeding out of a 1000 wounds and dying. That’s what we saw. That was just a few years after the last world war that killed 50 million people so it was really the height of death I was born into: two world wars that left 100 million people dead.

My parents were members of several generations of complete idiots. Constantly following some idiotic voice marching up and down killing lots of people. So you cannot do that and then think life goes on and it’s over and everybody’s happy. It will take a while to heal death. Spiritually there’s not much left. People were kind of kaput. For the religious people it meant going to church a lot. As a little kid I started to understand the enormous importance of sex. Because that is what the Roman Catholic Church taught children: “The biggest possible sin is sex!” As a kid you don’t even know what they are talking about. You only know this must be something of utter most importance. It was so bizarre; everybody starts to look weird and you didn’t understand what was going on you only knew: My God, there’s something out there that’s really strange and danergous. So that’s what I knew.

In German speaking countries of my generation, between us and our parents there was such a big break, such an enormous gap. I think it was probably the biggest break between any generations ever, because we hated everything that had to do with our parents’ generation. We just wanted to get out, we didn’t want to be there. So, the only window that would give us a vision to another world when we were kids were the movies, which we saw after church. We saw James Dean, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy (which, in German translated into “Fat and Stupid”). And then it was comic books. The first comic book we had was a Mickey Mouse comic book. Germany was under the occupation of the Allied forces.

In Vienna the land was divided into four sections: American, British, French, and Russian. We had the big luck of being in the Russian section, so there wasn’t much going on-except one day, some American officer said, “These kids don’t have comic books or anything. Maybe if we can get some and send them to them they might like it”-which was true. And so we got the first comic books and it was to our luck to have received the books of the best comic artist that ever lived in America: Karl Bark. This is the gentleman that invented Donald Duck-the Donald Duck as we know him in all the great comic stories. He was the guy that really made Donald a person. Donald actually existed before as some creature in animated movies, but he was not really a personality. Karl Bark turned him into a real person with a real family. So, for us, this was truly a salvation.

When I opened the first comic book it was like, literally-and I’m not exaggerating-it was like stepping out into the real world, out of a silent movie, two-dimensional, into a three-dimensional world that was filled with colors. I was almost blinded. It was dynamic and amazing. The first comic I opened-I was about was about 4 or 5 so I couldn’t read the letters but I could admire the pictures-I actually interpreted them as something else because later in life when I could read I thought, “Oh My God it’s an entirely different story.” But as a kid I saw this duck and his adventures in this strange world and I was fascinated by it all. A few years later the kids could buy little chewing gums, black German chewing gums—not very good but they had tiny little pictures of stars, singers, movie stars, German movie stars, which really sucked. I was totally not interested in them. I couldn’t care less about those stupid singers, but some kids got excited and collected these really badly printed little pictures.

Then one day, something strange happened. I bought a chewing gum. I opened it and was ready to throw away the wrapper because I didn’t care about it. Then, suddenly I was holding a picture in my hand, which depicted an angel. I had never seen such an angel before. I saw a being that was not human. It was so beautiful that I could not believe it. I was in total shock. I suddenly felt so lucky to possess this badly printed little picture. I thought, “It’s ubelievable that somebody can be so beautiful. It was Elvis. I didn’t know his name, I didn’t know who he was, I had never heard his music, I just thought he was so incredibly beautiful. He looked like a human being…just much more beautiful.

Words: Citizen LA|F/Photo: Citizen LA| Art