In this, his second full exhibition in Ireland, the Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein is showing some "autobiographical landscapes", which broadly outline the migrations he and his near-grown-up family have made from his native Vienna, through Germany, to America and Ireland, his family home since 1997, where Helnwein has just been granted citizenship.
Although using his trademark methodology - starting from digital and photographic tools and source material, and finishing with Old Master techniques on canvas - these new, seductive hyperrealist images mark a radical change of direction in a near 40-year career in which Helnwein has posited provocative figurative imagery in galleries, public spaces and even the media. These are usually expressions of - and lightning conductors for - emotion, shock, outrage and even humour.
But these landscapes also mark a return to his earliest artistic inspiration. While at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, he and some fellow students (including Manfred Deix and Robert Schoeller) were gobsmacked by a full-blown museum exhibition of German Romanticism and Realism. Somehow freed from the taint of Nazism, these paintings appeared, as Helnwein puts it, "like light falling into a dungeon". In response, they began trekking into the mountains of Austria and Southern Germany to sketch and paint en plein air. They immersed themselves in the literature of the Romantic period - writers like Heine and Eichendorf - in anachronistic protest against the shrine to Abstract Expressionism which the Academy had become.
Helnwein's meticulous Irish landscapes, which are the cornerstone of this Crawford show, are unashamedly aesthetic: gorgeous confections of pure, delicious spectacle. The typically epic but not inhuman scale imitates the subject matter. The tonal realism will make people go "Wow, are they paintings?" - thanks to the photorealist finish which seems free of the foibles of the human hand. Helnwein works with very small brushes - highlighting and subtly magnifying here, muting colours or creating shadows there; pushing some paintings towards momentary sleights of impressionism; and others towards seamless, burnished hyperreality.
Because each landscape starts life as a huge composite image worked up from high-defnition photographs, they appear less perceptually or psychologically embued than photographic in nature. But these are far from "literal" transcriptions of these views, which Helnwein has deliberately depopulated. Nothing here is accidental or entirely an artefact of a camera lens.
The bird's eye view suggests a kind of superhuman vision which can simultaneously take in the entire view with breath-taking clarity, like some bionic eagle. In fact, even to absorb the larger, panoramic paintings involves a combination of standing several feet back, and then moving closely along the canvas, squinting in at the limits of resolution.
Certainly, the photographic starting-point has its merits, considering the rapidly changing Atlantic weather and Irish light which can transmogrify a scene within seconds. Mountains can shimmer between colours while you glance at your watch. The soft, gauzy haze of easterly pollutants mute colours and blur contours. Vapour-saturated air produces dramatic lensing effects; while transitional weathers create aching tensions between, say, rain-pregnant cloud, and sudden sunlight which whack up a hillscape, say, into minute legiblility. Such a view is Irish Landscape IV (County Waterford), 2002-4, a light show which Helnwein renders like a glowering tone poem between the roving pools of sunlight and the squid-ink sky. Some fields are laden with gloom under an infestation of aphid-like sheep, while others are laser-read by miraculous searchbeams, radiating through the menacing raincloud like a hint of the divine.
But this is almost a sketch when set against the larger panoramas. Helnwein's first venture into the Irish landscape, the Nire Valley painting, was produced by photographing from a number of lofty positions on one side of the valley. In a peculiar example of the way he recycles images, Helnwein is exhibiting two paintings of this scene: the first Irish landscape he ever painted (courtesy of its owner, Hollywood actor, Jason Lee), and a new, larger version, five metres wide by one metre high.
Both are awesome views of a glacial landscape: the cloudshadow meandering over the undulating terrain; the once-forested valley denuded by millennia of human occupation, while the incisors of sheep have given it a added, botanical buzzcut. The naked rock breaks through on the dramatic upper slopes. To the left sits a corrie, a gigantic hole scooped out by an immense, rotating, rock-studded glacier, the corrie's walls rising up like an unfinished Mount Rushmore.
It's an implacable piece, with "nature" captured model-size: from the two snowy lambs in the left foreground, to the snaking, tiny lines of old stone walls; through scrubby, hawthorn hedgerows around more unkempt, boggy fields, to where trees, reduced to soughing broccoli, delimit a sunlit meadow beside the life-giving oxter of a watercourse, and back up the scrubby slope to where zigzag field-lines direct the eye to a highly Romantic conifer copse, etched against the blue-misted hills.
Another dramatic piece is Helnwein's sublime, seven-metre-wide take on an evening sky as seen from the roof of Tullamaine Castle in Wexford. It's another meticulously crafted representation of the commonplace wonders of a protean Irish sky: a symphony of light in constant interplay with the ragged aerial irrigation systems of the cloudscapes; vast sheets of broken stratocumulous advancing, like a host of vague snub-nosed zeppelins, over spinneys of mature demesne trees - from the gathering gloom in the south-east to the Turnesque furnace in the west.
Again, the drinkable detail: the wind-flung, scarcely visible specks of birds against the instantly recognisable Irish sky-palette - the mauvy-purple of the darkening clouds, their flanks tinged golden by the sinking sun. Through them, the azure sky peeks through, bearing no signs of rain, to every shepherd's delight; while faded Virgin Mary blues recede into smoky yellows in the distance. To the right, the sun sinks over darkening hedgerows and telegraph poles - and off into the far distance where the palest peaks melt into the false horizons of clouds.
A gentler Irish panorama is the view from the roof of Helnwein's neighbours in the rich Munster countryside, Lord Andrew and Lady Madeleine Lloyd Webber. It's another eagle's eye view over the managed, manorial landscape, with its pleasurably fizzing expanses of slightly surging woodland. Again, slanty, evening sunlight gilds the tips of the tree-canopy and warms the horse paddock over on the left; with its tractor ruts etched in high relief. Above that, more grazing and hay fields climb into Coillte plantations and blanket bog on the rising shoulder of Sliabh na mBan, the sacred mountain associated with myths of Finn McCool and his Fianna heroes. To the right, pastoral landscape recedes off into more blue-remembered hills. Odldy, Helnwein has maintained the presence of a farm house, nestling amongst the trees, and even - as though distantly heralding the approach of Thomas the Tank Engine - the white smoke of a local factory.
Otherwise, these are highly idealised views, with ne'er an aeroplane or fragmenting jettrail to interrupt the skies. They breathe a sense of a year well advanced, after the effusive growth and floral displays of May. Sunset seems to beckon, and with it, the sense of Romanticism Helnwein invokes, that behind the beauty, these are landscapes in long and tragic decline. Helnwein has a point. Having been spared the Industrial Revolution that made vast conurbations of England and Europe, Irish landscapes over the last decade have seen unprecedented development which is destroying 1,000 kilometers of hedgerow a year. As I write, the government is introducing legislation to allow them steamroll a density of archaeological treasures unrivalled in Europe. At a time when the population is rising for the first time since the Famine, the general view seems to be that we Irish are so spoilt with landscape, we can wipe our arses with it. The metaphor is not entirely inappropriate. Recently in the Silvermines Mountains in Tipperary, faced with a toxic swamp from the old mine outflow, somebody has had the bright idea of killing two birds with one stone - and pumping raw sewage in on top of it.
Helnwein's stated affinity is with the Romantic Age which began in the late 18th century, when the Renaissance and Classicism gave way to materialism and industrialism. In the air at the time were the stirrings of a resistance to Enlightenment rationalism. Irishman Edmund Burke had influentially dusted down the idea of "the Sublime" in aesthetic experience - in terms of the stronger emotions (including terror) and more irrational elements of art which were at odds with neoclassic order and harmony. It became a defining notion for the Romantic Age, and nowhere more so than in the German-speaking world, where all the high art forms were in full efflorescence.
German Romanticism is difficult to define, and is perhaps best described as a powerful, broad frequency of the imagination which has informed German art, culture and national identity ever since its inception. The emphasis is on a sense of powerful longing, emotional grandeur, expansive imagination, high idealism, bucking convention, a mystical unity with Nature and the divine spirit contained with it - all emblemised by the Blaue Blume, the motif of yearning evoked by Baron von Hardenberg (1772—1801) - aka Novalis, the “prophet of Romanticism". But such Romantic fervour always contained the seeds of virile Germanic nationalism. After all, the 19th century's dawn saw the Napoleanic humiliation, when the German Holy Roman Empire collapsed. The Germans looked simultaneously forwards to the end of French occupation, and backwards to the late mediaeval period when Germany had been united into a powerful indigenous culture. Radical Romantic patriots took to wearing German costumes from Dürer's time - the altdeutsch cape and floppy hat - a practice which was banned after the Congress of Vienna (1815) by conservative authorities.
But ancient national roots were breaking out of the soil all over Europe. While the Brothers Grimm were collecting German folklore and legends of the German Wald - and translating Thomas Crofton Croker's Irish fairy tales! - Edward Bunting was notating the dying strains of the old Gaelic harpists - which tunes were sweetend and set to lyrics by Irishman Thomas Moore (1779-1852) in his ten-volume, Irish Melodies which was hugely popular across Europe, and left Irish ears echoing with the immortal parlour warble of The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls and Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.. (Incidentally, part of Moore's 1817 poem, "Lalla Rookh" - based on a Persian folk-tale - provided the libretto for Robert Schumann's neglected Oratorio "Das Paradies und Die Peri" - a Düsseldorfer Symphoniker production of which Helnwein recently designed).
Meanwhile, the "nationalisation" of the Irish landscape began, paradoxically, with the Ordnance Survey mapping project, and its Memoirs. Scholars and topographical artists, including the polymath George Petrie, recorded ancient monuments and fused them to old Gaelic literature. Petrie - a prolific landscape artist recently lionised by the Crawford - was a consummately Romantic painter, whose Irish views groan with awe-inspiring emotion: the reeling cliffs at Dun Aengus Fort; the terrifying shafts of sunlight on the lake at Gougane Barra; the pilgrims and gravestones like staggering ants beneath the ivied, crow-thronged stonker of Clonmacnoise's ruined tower.
But however much blood-and-soil nationalism became entangled in the late dawning of Irish Romanticism, German Romanticism remains radioactive, thanks to its full-scale absorption into Nazi ideology: the cautionary, "pessimistic" vision of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea: Nietsche's idea of superhumanity in Also Sprach Zarathustra; and of course Wagner's musical absolutism and virulent anti-Semitism - particularly in light of the pan-Germanism which continues to wax and wane, particularly since German reunification in 1989.
Helnwein drew my attention to his key artists from the "Biedermeier" period (roughly 1815-1848) which, in a sense, is the antithesis of Romanticism in that it is associated with confined spaces, bourgeois familial bliss, sturdy rustic or small-town values. It also signals the rise of Austrian and Bavarian art: the magical child-paintings of Peter Fendi and Josef Danhauser; the astonishing, harshly lit, virtual photorealism of Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller; and the great humorist-fantasist, Carl Spitzweg's parade of comic eccentrics and pompous burghers.
But Helnwin's real touchstone is the great Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich (-1840), whose majestic, symbolist compositions of forests and mountains which, say, unify Nordic tree worship and the living Crucifix as a sprouting evergreen fir - are the visual equivalent of a Wagnerian horn-section.
In Untitled (After Casper David Friedrich) (1998), Helnwein, in Warholian fashion, boldly appropriates - and pays deep, cinematic, blue-black homage to - Friedrich's charged, nature-melodramatic painting, The Polar Sea (1824). Helnwein quoted this painting before in his triptych, The Silent Glow of the Avant Garde I (1986), flanked by two self-portraits like guardian angels: head-bandaged and doused in red paint, as though blindly, bloodily scanning the skies for enemy spitfires.
This latest version magnifes the painting hugely in a moody, spectral, sugary-icy blue monochrome which heightens the natural contrasts, and the sense of drama thanks to Helnwein's lighting effects, which impose a peculiar solitude and perspective. However, Friedrich's original is all there - Nature as a constant, infinite, momentous turnover of forces, the ice-sheets bludgeoning into each other in great planar cross-collisions of elemental power, splintering into lethal jags and patterns which emulate tectonic processes in a constant universal pattern of pulverising flux. You could nearly miss the tragic little galleon, like a child's toy tossed from the grinding tumult of splintering Matterhorns - a particularly Germanic-Romantic celebration of humanity dashed against the intensity and dispassionate cruelty of nature in all her savage pomp.
Although based on close studies of ice during the vicious winter of 1820-1, this icescape is not entirely imaginary. As a child, Friedrich witnessed, during an ice-skating excursion on the Baltic Sea, the drowning of his brother Christopher, who died while saving him. But no doubt, it is a more generalised allegory of the hubris of human endeavour, or our mortal slouch towards the grave.
Certainly, Friedrich was deeply religious (although not above the odd amorous image). Goethe, inspired by Englishman Luke Howard's classification of clouds, made the mistake of asking Friedrich to illustrate a meteorological tract of his - Friedrich was outraged at such sacrilege.
Interestingly, between 1820 and 1824, Dresden, where Friedrich lived, had been treated to three great panoramic paintings of North Polar Expeditions. These were the populist spectacles of their time: giant canvases in a circle up to 100 metres in circumference and twenty metres high and shown in custom-built rotundas, with a viewing platform at the centre, with objects between the canvas and the viewers. Friedrich planned to paint one himself around 1810, an idea he later dropped.
Stephan Oettermann has argued that many of Friedrich's paintings, particularly his famous Wanderer Over a Sea of Fog (1818), are based on panoramas. Our friend, contemplating the outlandish view from his platform-like outcrop of rock, is lit by two contradictory types of light - exactly matching the effect of a panorama. Others have argued further that Friedrich was offering a contemporary critique of the relationship between panorama and spectator suggesting "the conflicts of the dawning capitalist era".
Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1830) is another case in point, the two pensive foreground figures - said to be the 45-year-old Friedrich and 25-year-old August Heinrich, who had died of consumption - are looking DOWN on the horned moon and Venus. Also note Friedrich's patriotism. Having fled to the mountains when Napoleon occupied Dreden in 1913, he insisted on painting his nature-entranced characters in the Old German dress code until his death in 1840.
It's impossible to over-estimate Friedrich's influence. Irish photorealist artist Bobby Ballagh also quoted The Polar Sea in an animated projection for Riverdance, after Michael Flatley decided to do an "Ice King" number. Samuel Beckett was obsessed with Friedrich's moon-watchers, and quoted it imagistically in Waiting for Godot, in the wake of the catastrophe of WW2. Interestingly, Friedrich will be one of the cornerstones to a big show of 60 German Romanticism "masterpieces" - from Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie and elsewhere - at the National Gallery in Dublin this October.
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The most humungous canvas in Helnwein's Crawford show is the one depicting his native Vienna (1994-1995) - a full two metres high by seven meters across. It's not the Vienna I imagined from many conversations with Helnwein. Instead, it was executed at the request of a couple of wealthy clients whose rooftop vista in the old Museum Quarter was threatened by plans to build a Millennium tower. In the end, the tower project collapsed, and the painting now faces across from - and is ironically lit by - the once-doomed panorama it was intended to immorrtalise.
Helnwein brought his full armoury to the task, a mass of photographs which, compacted together, produce this hyperrealistic view of Vienna's turrets and chimneypots and lofts and spires - all warmed to the bone by the gauzy, slanting, evening sunlight. It's like a latterday Canaletto painting, writ large.
It is almost hard to believe that this is the Vienna which, in the dying years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spawned so many of the avant garde movements that defined 20th century European intellectual history: the Secessionist artists founded by Gustav Klimdt and Egon Schiele, Kandinsky and on through Kokoschka, Mahler, Schönberg, Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Wittgenstein, Bahr, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Musil, and, lest he slip our minds, Sigmund Freud.
However, in Helnwein's canvas, modernity slips into the far distance - out near the builder's crane, just yonder of the Gothic icon of Stephansdom (Dome of St Stephen's Cathedral), whose catacombs hold the bones of countless plague victims, alongside urns carrying internal organs belonging to the Hapsburgs, who ruled much of Europe for over 600 years.
Again, it's an idealised view - "the beautiful surface of Vienna", snarls Helnwein - of a kind of Eternal City of Baroque and Romanesque splendour; indeed the Romantic city of Mozart, Beethoven, Hayden, Schubert, Strauss, Brahms and many more - perched amongst tufts of Wienerwald in the rich Danube Valley. It's a roofscape of unpopulated churches, castles, colossal blocks, facades and hinterhofs, all fixed together in a restored architectural unity, like an expensive dental job, stretched into a sweetly grimacing smile.
Perhaps only the leaden bank of cloud gives any hint of Helnwein's ambiguous relationship with his city, and its history. This skyline, after all, is heavily reconstructed after the WW2 Allied air raids which destroyed over 86,000 homes - before the Russians, as they say, "liberated" the city. I am reminded of another Helnwein cityscape from 1993 in which, again in wild Warholian style, Helnwein "appropriated" a detail of the famous photograph of the cataclysmic ruins of Dresden (this painting now hangs amongst the Ludwig collection in the Chinese Museum of Art in Beijing). Rerendered in another blue-black monochrome, the view is framed, with heart-breaking perversity, by "the Angel of Dresden" who miraculously survived the carpet bombing. She extends her hand, in munificence and tender mercy, to the twisted, mangled, smouldering wasteland of a city which has been mercilessly pounded out of existence.
And there's your sublimity: the unimaginable enormity of that slaughter - to say nothing of the Holocaust - which still punches holes in any rationale of Western civilisation. Here is Dresden, once the cultural and architectural jewel in the crown of the prosperous Saxony kingdom, phosphor-bombed into hell, and with it Vienna, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin and many other cities, before Hitler's sordid capitulation in the Berlin bunker - after which the Allies comfortably turned their unlimited attention to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the exercise that eventually turned America into a global Empire.
Albeit born in 1948, Helnwein saw the ruination at close quarters, which inevitably fed an apocalytic imagination. He lived in the old Viennese working class district of Favouriten, which lay until 1955 in the Stalin-era, Soviet-occupied zone of the city. Although born into a "middle-middle class" family of Roman Catholics, in Favoriten, Helnwein says, "you had to be either a communist or a socialist, there was nothing else." The building he lived in "endured a miserable existence" between an old foundry and a factory. He remembers truckloads of Red Army soldiers crashing through the dead, silent streets, where only "bulky, misshapen and bent" people walked, keeping a low profile.
Perhaps a clue to Helnwein's monochromes is his abiding memory of his room at night suffused with the light of an illuminated Red Army Star which now adorned the old Nazi-era factory. Meanwhile, his days were "grey, sticky like slime, and filled with unlimited boredom" - that is, until the epiphany of discovering Disney comics, particularly Carl Barx's Donald Duck. These translated comics were actually more visually alluring than their American counterparts, in that after being translated (partly as propaganda), they were beautifully repainted by German artists, and printed by excellent German printers.
Certainly, in those days, few Austrians boasted of the exultant welcome they gave to the Anschluss in 1938, and Hitler's triumphant rally at the Heldenplatz in Vienna - himself an Austrian from Linz who had left Vienna as an artist disgruntled at having his portfolio rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts. Austria had collaborated fully in the Nuremberg racial laws, and in Krystallnacht in November 1938, all but one of Vienna's synagogues were burnt down. By war's end, Austria had sent 60,000 Jews to the death camps - a factor only officially acknowledged in 1993, when Chancellor Franz Vranitsky admitted that Austrians were "willing servants of Nazism".
In the oppressive silence of shame, fear and defeat, Helnwein's childhood dawned into the legacy of Nazism, discovering photographs of his father (who was wounded on the Eastern front, but never spoke about it), his grandfather and all his uncles in Hitler's Wehrmacht uniforms. The early work expressed some of that sense of horror, rage, guilt and tormented incomprehension which have informed many artists of his generation.
Helnwein's fellow-Trümmerkind (Child of the Ruins), if you like, the late, expatriate German writer W. G. Sebald (1945-2001), also made these denied race-memories a major theme of his work. From The Emigrants (1996) : "Ever since I had once visited Munich, I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word 'city' as the presence of heaps of rubble, fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air." When Sebald lectured in German literature at Manchester University after 1966, the blitzed city was still something of a wasteland. Later, travelling across Europe, Sebald was struck by how war damage was compounded by postwar demolitions in the name of new development.
Visiting Nuremberg, Sebald's alter-ego narrator in Austerlitz finds a very carefully reconstructed city: "Looking up at the facades… even those of the older buildings which, judging by their style, must date from the 15th or 16th centuries, I was troubled to realize that I would not see a crooked line anywhere, not at the corners of the houses or on the gables, the window-frames or sills, nor was there any other trace of past history."
While the Allied bombings on German civilians and cities are increasingly demonised in the former Allied countries, in Germany and Austria, the issue seems more problematic. In Sebald's last book, the posthumous Natural History of Destruction, he described the atrocities that befell Hamburg. From the diaries of a Friedrich Reck (who died of typhus in Dachau shortly before war's end), Sebald recalls Upper Bavarian refugees cramming onto a train, when someone's suitcase fell open, spilling out "toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago." Before his death in a car crash in 2001, Sebald characterised the "collective amnesia" of these events as a "scandalous deficiency" - "tantamount to a second liquidation of the nation's history."
Last year, German historian Jörg Friedrich (b. 1944), in his book Brandstätten (Places of Fire), published photographs of Germany during the war. From Dresden, in 1945, came an image of an enormous pyre of partly carbonized German corpses - at once, equalled in death to the inmates of extermination camps, except the little legs of the children and their elders were not at all so painfully thin as those Jews, Gypsies, Sinti, Communists and other Untermensch wartorn Nazi society corraled into the camps. The Süddeutsche Zeitung advised readers to throw Friedrich's book into the bin, while Helmut Kohl called on Friedrich to also include photographs showing the effects of Nazi bombing on British and Polish cities - lest Friedrich be accused of portraying Germans as victims, and the British and Americans as war criminals. Friedrich grimly commented that Goebbels' ban on the publication of such imagery seemed somehow still in place.
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Something of Helnwein's apocalyptic imagination also informs one of his "American paintings" at the Crawford - another cityscape, San Francisco Harbor (1999). The source image, one of many Helnwein culled from public libraries and newspaper archives, dates back to the late 40s or 1950s - long before the glittering structures of San Francisco's current financial district. Again, Helnwein has depopulated the city, and rendered it like a smoke-blue, spent and wasted husk; its lifeless, toxic waters like a sheet of blue aluminium. We see the city rising from the northern waterfront, up through Chinatown and Russian Hill to the mystic bergs of the Twin Peaks. Again one has to retreat some distance until the painting sharpens into focus, while up close, the blocks and buildings degenerate into a dappled interplay of planes and rhythmic, painterly brushstrokes.
The overall effect is post-apocalyptic, perhaps some catastrophe created by Samuel T. Cohen's "neutron bomb", which produces limited blast and heat, but whaps out a massive wave of neutron and gamma radiation which kills everything in its path - but leaves tanks, buildings, motorways and other infrastructure standing. When Ronald Reagan proposed siting such missiles in Germany - after remarking that a limited nuclear war could be confined to Europe - a pan-European "peace movement" sparked a debate with which Helnwein engaged.
Helnwein's image darkly lampoons Reagan's America as "a shining city on a hill". It somehow also recalls San Francisco's own largely forgotten apocalypse in the 1906 Earthquake, shortly preceded by the arrival of plague in 1900, when buboes were found on a corpse in a cheap Chinatown hotel (sparking the "Yellow Peril" agitation - plague, supposedly, had "a strong preference for yellow meat"). The Board of Health forcibly cordoned over 25,000 people into Chinatown - a quarantine luridly cheerled by William Randolph Hearst's newspapers - but the plague still caused 119 deaths. Despite a widespread anti-rat campaign, the 1906 earthquake and disastrous fire dispersed infected rats through the ruins of the city. After a subsequent flare-up - in Caucasian neighbourhoods, where 89 died - exterminators "rat-proofed" the entire peninsula, destroying 1,713 houses in poor areas.
Oddly, San Francisco is where Helnwein is represented by Martin Muller's Modernism gallery, which also hosts his compatriots, Hermann Nitsch and Arnulf Rainer, as well as the estimable Robert Crumb. It is also the City where - overlapping with the Crawford exhibition - Helnwein mounts his first solo museum show in America: a retrospective featuring a long-dominant theme in his work, images of children - particularly girl-children: from the earliest doll-children with facial wounds; to his contemporary parables of American children irradiated by the sick blue glare of a tv, or standing alone and Ritalin-dazed, wielding a cold revolver.
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Although it's not the largest canvas in the show, American Landscape I: Death Valley (2002-4) is the biggest production. The product of hundreds of source images, it was photographed over ten days from the Mojave Desert from where, as I write, a rocket called The White Knight has just delivered the first US commercial space flight into orbit. The place is dotted with ghost towns from the Gold Rush, a little Indian reservation, and military compounds of unknown purpose.
The result is a gargantuan panorama of one of the most hostile places on the planet. The effect is reminiscent of the monumental paintings of the American Luminists, those 19th century painters who first immortalised the vast, unseen expanses of the American continent with their hyperrealistic use of light and aerial perspective, and their technique of smearing out the brushstrokes, to eliminate the artist's hand and enhance the illusion of a squeaky-clean window onto nature.
Looking across the arid scrub of the valley and up into the parallel ranges like the Panamint Range and the Funeral and Black Mountains, Helnwein relished the raw snarl of geology at work - the 140 mile long Valley itself is being stretched by tectonic activity. Landlocked by the great Sierra Nevada to the west, which leaves the Valley dessicated in a colossal rain shadow, the perpetual drought is only occasionally relieved by violent thunderstorms and flash floods which deposit crystallised salt on the valley floor.
But the cool-blue, jag-toothed, forbidding hills are the real subject here, and their jutting planes is pure Romantic-fantastic, like a scene from Lord of the Rings. Stare at it too long, and weird anthropomorphic or animal forms, seemingly trapped in the rock, pop into visiibility - a howling maw, the mashed snout of a giant mandrill - echoing the way this place is heavily mythologised, after the first white migrants pushed their wagons westwards across it in search of gold and land, leaving an ecology of "shrieking maniacs crazed by thirst and heat. ... Indians, outlawed whites, venomous reptiles, human skulls and sun-bleached skeletons…"
Nowadays, casual airflight will take you over into LA where Helnwein's work has found a ready market, where Hollywood basks in the overlit anxieties created by the San Andreas fault. Helnwein's celebrity friends include rocksters from Beck to that other flamboyant purveyor of the grotesque, Marilyn Manson, whose work was blamed for the Columbine massacres, and whom Helnwein recently immortalised as a lop-eared Mickey Mouse. Other friends and clients include Sean Penn, Ben Kingsley and his colossal fellow-Austrian, now Governor of Callifornia, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It can be like another Greater Germany out there. Penn contributed recently to a documentary on Helnwein's 1988 Krystallnacht piece in association with the Museum of Tolerance, as did Maximilian Schell, who won an Oscar for his performance in The Trial with Marlene Dietrich. Helnwein first worked with Schell 20 years ago, when he designed the poster for Schell's famous documentary on Dietrich, in which her voice is heard - but she never appears on camera.
Next year, incidentally, Schell will direct the Los Angeles Opera production of Richard Straus' four-and-a-half-hour Der Rosenkavalier, with Helnwein designing the set, costumes and masks (Straus's relationship with the Nazis was ambiguous, although he was exonerated after the war. His Vier Letzte Lieder are an exquisitely nostalgic addition to that uniquely Germanic genre of song, while his Metamorphosen was written as a memorial after the bombings of the Munich, Dresden and Vienna opera houses).
Meanwhile, although Helnwein loves the "peaceful anarchy" of LA, he and his German wife, Renate, talk of Ireland as though they have somehow arrived in heaven. Maybe this will impel him more deeply into his new line of Irish landscape work, by walking out further into these places, maybe up to those remote, extreme fastnesses of rock, where the sky force-fills your lungs. Following the gaze, onwards and upwards into the Sublime…
© Mic Moroney, 2004