Rebellion and unlimited expression run through Arnulf Rainer’s entire oeuvre. He was part of a group of post-war painters who focused on the act of painting, the Art Informel. They wanted to make ‘informal’ art without predetermined rules, in order to get rid of the yoke of the past and present.
Rainer was born in 1929 in Baden bei Wien, Austria and grew up in a torn Europe. He spent his high school years at a Nazi boarding school in Traiskirchen during the war years. At the end of the war he left for family in Villach to study architecture and construction at the vocational school there.
As an artist, Rainer is largely self-taught. After his final exams, he was successively accepted for the graphics course at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts and the painting course at the Vienna Academy of Liberal Arts. However, in both courses he lasted a maximum of three days before he came into conflict with his teachers and left.
Averse to tradition
Rainer not only related to Austria’s Nazi past, he also reacted against Austria’s extremely conservative social environment after the war. Averse to traditional painting, Rainer was inspired by the new movements that entered Vienna in the 1940s and 1950s. He joined Art Club: an artists’ movement that promoted the autonomy of modern art and embraced surrealism. In 1951, together with fellow artist Maria Lassnig, he visited one of the leaders of the surrealist movement: André Breton. Apparently the painter was not really impressed by his meeting with the surrealist.
Rainer had already split from the Art Club a year earlier. Together with Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehmden, Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hollegha and Josef Mikl, he founded the ‘Hundsgruppe’. They had difficulty with the aesthetic approach of the Art Club. In 1952 the Hundsgruppe held their first and only collective exhibition. A scandal immediately arose there, because Rainer did not appreciate Ernst Fuchs’ opening speech and started shouting. He turned his back on the collective and with it the Art Club.
Total surrender
Inspired by, among other things, surrealist automatism – in which the artist exercises minimal control over the creative process – Rainer’s art is driven by the subconscious, intuition and total surrender. Over the course of his career, he painted with his eyes closed, with his hands and feet instead of a brush, and worked like a maniac on his canvas.
Fascinated by the idea of madness and the expressive power of intuition, he worked with mentally challenged people. In an attempt to approach intuition even more directly and to completely separate it from the human scale, he painted together with monkeys – although they proved to be somewhat difficult to control.
A visitor to the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden in front of Arnulf Rainer’s work ‘Platanenkreuz’ from 1990/91
Photo ANP / EPA
A visitor to Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden in front of the work ‘Kistenwalhalla’ (1980/88) by Arnulf Rainer.
Photo ANP / EPA
Rainer also had some affinity with the Wiener Aktionists of the 1970s and gained greater fame when they came into the spotlight. The Wiener Aktionists were a radical group of artists who broke taboos by producing shocking work. They smeared each other with paint and blood during group experiments and elevated self-harm to an art form. Like Rainer, they found inspiration in madness, the subconscious and were constantly looking for ways for uninhibited self-expression.
Rainer ultimately became best known for his ‘Übermalungen’, in which he painted over (photographic) reproductions of existing works. He usually used portraits that he ‘intensified’ by intuitively applying rapid layers of paint over them with his hands. The works he selected for this often came from artists he admired.
But one of the most famous series he made consists of self-portraits of Rainer in which he looks as if he is being tortured. Thick strokes of paint emphasize the expressive facial expressions of his pained face. He often worked in series, he also painted over landscapes, death masks and self-portraits by well-known artists such as Rembrandt and Goya.
On the one hand, Rainer was known as a rebellious ‘wild man’ who could splash a painting full of paint in just a few movements, and on the other hand, he was a disciplined worker. When he was already in his nineties, he still worked long hours in his studio. He was no longer able to paint with his hands and his expressive movements slowed down, but he continued to measure himself against his examples. Like a now ‘delayed wild man’ he painted over their portraits to outdo them. Rainer died on Thursday in Vienna, he was 96 years old.
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