Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor (of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums), deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.
But the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes.
Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 17. November 2004
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California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. さてさて。旅行記めいたものを書きますと長くなり、途中でやめてしまうことが多いので、今回の旅行の中で印象に残った点を、つらつらと書いてみたいと思います。ゴットフリード・ヘルンウｪイン（Gottfried Helnwein）。この片仮名表記で合ってるかどうかわかりませんが。オーストリア人アーティストです。現在のコンテンポラリーでは、彼の作品展「The Child」が開催されていました。 ...

..A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it included self-portraits, is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within. ...

For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Robert Flynn Johnson, the curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, has assembled a thought-provoking selection of Helnwein’s works and provided an insightful essay on his art in this exhibition catalogue.
Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality.
Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses. Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public.
The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with important and sometimes controversial topics in our society. ...

TOP 10
The Gottfried Helnwein exhibition "The Child" at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, July) was chosen as the most important show of a contemporary artist in 2004.
"In the first of two shows (the other at the Modernism Gallery in November), Helnwein's large format, photo-realist images of children of various demeanors boldly probed the subconscious. Innocence, sexuality, victimization and haunting self-possession surge and flicker in Helnwein's unnerving work." ...

Gottfried Helnwein’s first one-man exhibition at a major American museum is long overdue. 35 years in the making, “The Child” is a collection of more than fifty drawings, watercolors, photographs, and paintings (several monumental in size). It’s also a show that shocks, and among the crowds thronging to see it, some patrons will be put off: the day I attended, a few seemed downright uncomfortable, if not hostile, toward the work. This is fine. Art should shock, and provoke, and make us feel queasy sometimes.
“The Child” achieves all three, but also startles us with aching beauty, bedazzles us with painterly skill, and injects a necessary perspective into the culture’s collective conscience. ...

Die Zurschaustellung des eigenen Körpers als Verwesungsmasse beginnt mit den Selbstporträts von George Grosz als Suizidgestalt im Kaffeehaus und reicht über die wie durch den Fleischwolf gedrehten Konterfeis eines Francis Bacon bis hin zur Leichenfledderei am eigenen Leib bei Günter Brus, Kurt Kren oder Frank Tovey, dem jüngst verstorbenen Enfant terrible der experimentellen New-Wave-Szene der 1980er Jahre. Die Befreiung des melancholischen Bewusstseins durch den Tod bietet keine philosophische Perspektive mehr. Es ist ihm ohnedies schon anheim gefallen. Stattdessen wird der Suizid in einer Performance masochistischer Selbstverstümmelung kultisch sublimiert.
In einer fotografischen Inszenierung Gottfried Helnweins erhebt sich der Künstler, fäulnisschwarz und monumental wie das Mahnmal einer letzen Einsicht: “So ist Verzweiflung, diese Krankheit im Selbst, die Krankheit zum Tode. Der verzweifelte ist todkrank. Der Tod ist nicht das letzte der Krankheit, aber der Tod ist in einem fort das Letzte. Von dieser Krankheit erlöst zu werden durch den Tod ist eine Unmöglichkeit, denn die Krankheit und deren Qual und der Tod ist gerade, nicht sterben zu können.”
So ist die Geschichte der Moderne nicht zuletzt auch eine Erfolgsgeschichte der Melancholie und des Eindringens ihres schwarzen Spuks in die letzten Paradiese des Seins- und Weltvertrauens. ...

The thing you should know about this "Rosenkavalier" is that it is terrific. Richard Strauss' opera sounds great and looks sensational. It is excellently sung, sumptuously conducted by Kent Nagano and, thanks to Gottfried Helnwein, wondrously strange.
Helnwein — the Austrian artist (painter, photographer, performance artist, filmmaker) who has a studio in downtown L.A. — is known for everything from Marilyn Manson videos to Holocaust installations. He is responsible for the sets, costumes and that ad (which, by the way, looks like an image from a recent staging of a Schumann oratorio that Helnwein designed in Düsseldorf).
Helnwein's vision of "Rosenkavalier" is monochromatic and a riot of color. It is oddly traditional yet seriously odd. It is updated but couldn't be more 18th century. And none of those opposites contradicts. ...

In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" Sometimes viewers reply, assaulting pictures of innocent children, worshipping those of a murderous dictator. Yet such reactions can only bring us to inquire again, louder and with greater urgency, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own. ...

Gottfried Helnwein's Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi) is a strange takeoff on a traditional New Testament theme in art. The work depicts a Madonnalike mother displaying her baby to attentive Nazi officers, Painted in hyperrealist grisaille with chiaroscuro effects, the work resembles an old documentary photograph made huge. The eerie, sinister overtones are unmistakable. Who is this mother? What do these officers want with her and her child? What kind of official paper might the officer on the left hold in his hand and what might be its result? Helnwein, characteristically, presents us with an ambiguous, haunting image and leaves us to wonder about its meaning. Helnwein's background perhaps helps explain why his often difficult subjects have been interpreted in various, often contradictory, ways by opposing sides of the political debate about World War II. With its huge size, hyperrealist style, and disturbing content, this unsettling work bestows a psychological anxiety accompanied by a strong magnetic pull. Confronting it, we tend to stare-entranced by both its beauty and its seductive, malevolent overtones. ...

Her lips are parted and colored a luscious deep red. The pancake makeup on her face gives off a marble-white glow. A jacket, adorned with braided gold epaulets at the shoulders, yawns open, exposing a wide expanse of skin down her chest. She appears to be about 8 years old.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the subject of Gottfried Helnwein's new, large-format digital prints at San Francisco's Modernism Gallery might have alarmed or even scandalized a viewer. Not anymore -- or at least not so reflexively...
Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.
But the most haunting images, here and across town at Modernism, may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes. ...

Completacion del rodaje y edicion de NOCHE DEL NUEVE DE NOVIEMBRE.
- Un documental referente a los ninos y el holocausto en el arte de Gottfried Helnwein. Director: Henning Lohner
Co-Director & Editor: Max Carlson
Comentaristas: Sean Penn, Maximilian Schell, Jason Lee
Texto introductorio de Simon Wiesenthal
Director de Fotografia: Darren Rydstrom
Camara Adicional: Jason Lee, Bernd Reinhardt
Helmut Lohner conversa con Gottfried Helnwein ...

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Dans mon récit, j’ai l’intention de présenter des œuvres de Gottfried Helnwein dans lesquelles il aborde le sujet du nazisme. Cependant, même si le rapport au nazisme dans l’œuvre d’Helnwein est au cœur de ma propre curiosité, il n’est pas nécessairement au centre du travail de l’artiste. D’après ma compréhension, la référence au thème du nazisme dans l’œuvre d’Helnwein fait partie d’un contexte plus vaste de sa vision du monde, que je vais présenter. Si on ignore la totalité de son œuvre et si on se concentre uniquement sur ces nombreux travaux où il parle du nazisme, on risque d’avoir une vision partielle de plusieurs niveaux d’analyse qui sont inhérents à sa pensée. Je vais traiter non seulement les sujets qu’il a choisis d’aborder, mais aussi le contexte historique de sa création qui est aussi significatif en regard de ses choix. Pour des raisons de clarté et afin de mettre en relief mon intérêt personnel pour la représentation controversée du nazisme dans l’art contemporain, je vais traiter séparément les œuvres au sujet du nazisme, sans ignorer naturellement le contexte de leur création. ...

Si on essaie de comprendre la démarche artistique et critique d’Helnwein, il est nécessaire de prendre en considération ses autoportraits. Les autoportraits sont partis intégrale de sa carrière depuis le début, et forment une clé importante pour déchiffrer de son œuvre.
“ L’artiste et son art ne font qu’un dans l’autoportrait. Ils s’expliquent, ils se répondent ”, comme l’a écrit Philippe Dagen. Si on ignore les nombreux autoportraits de Helnwein, on risque de laisser passer inaperçus les messages les plus profonds et capitaux que l’artiste transmet par son art.
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Indifférence et reniement sont les mots clés dans une république qui se présente comme la “ première victime ” du nazisme. Lors de la Seconde République autrichienne on préfère ignorer et effacer la joie et l’acceptation du fameux “ Anschluss ”, l’annexion de l’Autriche à l’Allemagne en mars 1938, quand les troupes allemandes sont entrées en Autriche sans rencontrer aucune résistance. Le fait que Hitler ait été accueilli comme un libérateur par 200,000 personnes à Vienne est un détail réprimé dans un pays qui essaye de réhabiliter son prestige, son économie et son infrastructure. L’Autriche libre, démocratique et indépendante établit vite sa stabilité politique et même sa prospérité.
Dans la Seconde République autrichienne, la liquidation du passé nazi n’est pas radicale : les anciens adhérents du parti nazi sont vite réintégrés dans la plupart des secteurs de la société. ...

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Helnwein’s subject matter involves the complexities of the human condition. His disturbing yet provocative images of physically and emotionally wounded children have been seen as metaphors for larger global issues. He portrays the innocence of adolescence against the backdrop of shameful historical events like the Holocaust to highlight the fragility of humanity in an unstable world. Like Wong from Asia and Sherman from the United States, Helnwein offers up dramatic scenarios featuring youthful protagonists that beg a viewer to complete the equation.
The child’s face – painted in a realistic style yet eerily unreal – may allude to the uncertain (in limbo-like) quality of Helnwein’s own childhood. Helnwein is among a network of contemporary artists expressing visions that embrace and also transcend cultural nomenclature. ...

Beyond his treatment of common children's motifs - dolls, toys and ambivalent nymphets- Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's vision is shrouded in an aura of enigmatic darkness. With his giant color portraits of stillborn babies; paintings that juxtapose Nazi-era photographs with his own images; and pictures of deformed, abjectly countenanced children swathed in bandages, Helnwein is preoccupied with the indelible suffering that mirrors the more delicate aspects of youth. His work is hauntingly gorgeous and suffused with pathos, precisely because viewers are immediately aware of the larger threat that looms within the pieces: the rupture of innocence. ...

Es gibt gewichtige Gründe, um Helnwein als den legitimen Erben Beuys und Warhols zu bezeichnen. Einerseits folgt er in seinen Werken rituellen Mustern, andererseits spielt er mit einer Reihe von künstlerischen Variationen. Er untergräbt die Magie der Bilderwelt, indem er einen Störfaktor einbaut, durch den ein Schock im Verhältnis zwischen dem Kunstwerk und dem Betrachter entsteht. Helnwein vermischt Altes mit Neuem, und sein Stil spiegelt den Beginn der Moderne, aber auch die Welt des Cyberspace wieder. Einen großen Einfluss hat das Wien der sechziger Jahre auf ihn. Auch wird er von der Welt des Comics inspiriert. Helnwein besuchte die 'Höhere Graphische Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt'. Um gegen die tägliche Routine des Klassenzimmers zu protestieren, schnitt er sich mit einer Rasierklinge die Hände auf. Durch diesem Vorfall wurde ihm bewußt, wie hilflos die Gesellschaft auf körperliche Ungerechtigkeit und auf Verletzungen reagiert. Nach dem Abschluss an der 'Graphischen' besuchte er die Wiener Akademie der Künste. Zu dieser Zeit tauchte auch zum ersten mal eines seiner Leitmotive auf: Kinder. Durch das Malen von verletzten Kindern verursachte Helnwein eine Art Schock, und brachte somit den 'Horror' zurück in die Kunst. Damit zeigte er offen den Zynismus einer Gesellschaft, die nicht mehr die Dinge so sieht, wie sie sind, dessen Sichtweise aber durch 'Bilder über Dinge' geprägt ist. ...

Helnwein:
"I think art always reflects the society and the time the artist lives in; it always tells you something about the condition of the culture.
This is the age of materialism and profit, accompanied by its favorite all-eating pet – the entertainment industry. Therefore in order not to sink into oblivion, in a desperate struggle to be heard and seen, many artists and curators try to compete with this multi-media-entertainment-Godzilla, trying to be just as loud and cheap and stupid. That’s why 70% to 80% of all the contemporary art in our museums is crap.
It’s true though that each time has its own aesthetic values and if you want to reach the people of today you have to develop an artistic language that they can understand. And that’s what I try to do – my audience is the great love-affair of my life. I am obsessed with my public, and all I want to do with my art is touch them and move them and to hold them tight – and sometimes I want to kick their ass. That is all I care about.
But I also listen to them and take them and their responses serious, because they and other artists are the only ones that ever taught me anything." ...