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Shake It Up Baby

© Christine Hamm

The art of Gottfried Helnwein

Gottfried Helnwein is responsible for some of the art I hate most in the world. His series, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, depicting James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Bogart, has been reproduced and sold in the millions and millions. To me, the series has always represented an all-time low in pop art, in mindless star worship. But as I will explain, Helnwein manages to shake up all preconceptions.

Imagine my surprise when I realized that one of my new favorites, the creator of an agonized continuing series of self-portraits and disturbed, wounded girls, is also the painter of the drivel that gags me.

Helnwein gives equal respect to popular “low” art and intellectually challenging, “high” art. In one of his more famous pieces, a monochromatic pencil work, Donald Duck and Picasso contemplate each other with mutual distrust. Cartoon creatures often share the page with realistically drawn, mutilated girls. To Helnwein, they are of equal aesthetic importance. Comic books are not a degradation of the visual arts to Helnwein. Unlike Lichenstein, who revels in the irrelevance and stupid sensibility of the comic book medium, Helnwein’s comic references are not in any way ironic.

This is not to say, however, that Helnwein is not fully aware of the power of all art. His damaged girls appear to refer to the damaged repressed soul of his country, Austria, which has institutionalized its repression of any memory of its role in the holocaust. The horror Austria perpetrated during WWII has been recreated as a distant, not terribly unpleasant memory. Austrian society has become the modern world’s center of the disappeared -- the disappeared history. Helnwein has, since the beginning of his work as an artist, challenged this repression. As a youth he was expelled from art school amid a tremendous furor for painting a picture of Hitler in his own blood. And, metaphorically, he has been doing the same thing ever since.

That is, expressing viscerally through his art how the history of his country has damaged him and his soul (as represented by the wounded girls). One of his most influential pieces depicted a dead child next to a half-eaten plate of food, with a thank you note to the new head of Austria’s department of Psychiatry, who had poisoned the food of “unfit children” during the holocaust, and publicly justified his actions by saying that it was “kinder” than lethal injections. There was an outcry after Helnwein’s painting was shown, and the psychiatrist was eventually removed from his post.

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