Helnwein ...was born in war-torn Vienna in 1948 and received a classical education under Rudolf Hausner at Vienna’s academy. But in the late 1960’s, he and fellow art students rebelled, staging Aktions or happenings within the Vienna Academy and out in the streets. In one, Helnwein stood quietly for hours with an enormous three-foot papier mache sculpture of a hornet clinging to his back. In 1971 he began the first of a series of troubling pictures showing children grotesquely disfigured with surgical scars.