Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
California Palace of the Legion of Honor
31 July 2004 —28 November 2004

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are pleased to present the first one-person museum exhibition in America of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. The Child:
Works by Gottfried Helnwein features a major theme that has appeared in his work over the last thirty-five years.
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. The Fine Arts Museums’ past exhibitions of contemporary work dealing with such ideas have included the art of Hung Liu, Robert Arneson, Enrique Chagoya, Fred Wilson, and Adi Nes. This exhibition also allows us to exhibit for the first time a major donation to the Fine Arts Museums, Gottfried Helnwein’s 1998 painting Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds). The generous gift of Martin Muller, this imposing painting is a key work in Helnwein’s art of the 1990s.
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Harry S.Parker III
Director of Museums
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, Legion of Honor, Gottfried Helnwein

Essay by Robert Flynn Johnson
Curator in Charge
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
California Palace of the Legion of Honor

"Helnwein and the Child", by Robert Flynn Johnson, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Legion of Honor, Galleries 1 & 2
31 July–28 November 2004

The presentation at the Legion of Honor of The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein marks the first one-man museum showing in the United States of the work of Internationally-known Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein (b. Vienna, 1948). The display of approximately 19 paintings, 13 drawings and watercolors, and over 20 photographs spanning a 35-year period from the early 1970s until the present, features a major theme that has consistently appeared in his work: innocence as embodied by the child.

The subject matter of Helnwein’s art concerning the child ranges from subtle inscrutability to stark brutality. Many of his works are large format, which further increases the impact of his themes, which are often difficult and shaded with menacing undertones. Says Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator in Charge, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, "Despite the technical beauty and virtuosity of Helnwein’s art, what makes his art significant is, instead, its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the pertinent subjects he chooses." He adds, "Many people feel that museums should be a refuge to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness and brutality of the world. This notion sometimes sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public. While this exhibition will inspire and enlighten many, it may also upset others, as sometimes does art that deals with important themes in our society."

The child, for Helnwein, is the symbol of innocence, but also innocence betrayed.
In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, sexual exploitation, and the numbing predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Helnwein--who grew up in Austria in the years following World War II in the somber atmosphere of a defeated country that had embraced Nazism--has an emotional tie to children who have been robbed of experiencing childhood without trauma. Since his earliest works, he has linked children with pain, or the suggestion of pain. The wounded child became for him a metaphor for the chaos of an emotionally vacant world.
Frequently his works suggest to viewers that they are witnessing a scene taking place in the midst of a disturbing drama that is sometimes heightened by the inclusion of Nazi officers or Nazi symbols. The drama, however, is presented without narrative, which creates the uncomfortable effect of raising but not answering difficult questions. The tension thus created puts the viewer in the position of having to examine his or her own responses to provocative and ambiguous vignettes.

The exhibition is also the occasion for the inaugural showing of Helnwein’s 1998 painting Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds), a major gift to the Fine Arts Museums from San Francisco gallery owner Martin Muller. This imposing (8 ft. x 10 ft.) painting is a key work in Helnwein’s oeuvre during the 1990s and in his continuing involvement with the theme of the child.
Epiphany II is from an important series of three paintings created by Helnwein over a three-year period and in which he refers directly to his "own (our) historical background." Says the artist, "The most significant issue on the time track of the occident is Christianity and the male dominated world of conquering and oppression. The constant slaughter of the "weak--women, children, the Jews, and other ethnic minorities through holy wars, crusades and …constant extermination…."

The seamless melding in Epiphany II of a version of the Adoration of the Magi with a scenario out of the Third Reich is in keeping with Helnwein’s desire to press the limits of juxtaposed imagery. Says Robert Flynn Johnson, "The apparent blasphemy of this scene of Nazi evil encountering the Madonna and Child in a stadium setting is not so clear cut for Helnwein. Rather it is a more symbolic case of unconditional evil, the Third Reich, meeting "conditional evil," the Catholic Church, particularly in light of Pope Pius XII’s alleged moral complicity during World War II." The surreal atmosphere within the picture is attributable to Helnwein’s insertion of the veracity of a carefully composed news photo into a traditional Renaissance composition.

Gottfried Henlwein describes his childhood as "a horror, " and "a world of deep depres-sion and unlimited boredom" that was permeated with the knowledge that something had happened about which no one wanted to speak. One of his signal memories is being given his first Mickey Mouse comic book from an American. Receiving the cartoon book was tantamount to being released from a two-dimensional world without color and being propelled into a three-dimensional world full of colors and wonders. Comics and Mickey Mouse, his childhood vehicle for escaping from what he refers to as "the cold Nazi-country into a world of joy and wonder," still figure in his mature work. An example is his signal painting, MIckey Mouse (1995), a 12-foot-long canvas. Even a cartoon character, however, in Helnwein’s vernacular becomes ambiguous. In this case, Mickey looks both benignly sweet and threateningly sinister. He could represent either the wondrous fantasy world of the child or the global reach of a powerful corporation that, in Helnwein’s view, "smothers the world."

Gottfried Helnwein began his formal training in art when he was admitted in1969 to the Vienna Academy of Art, where for four years he immersed himself in the structure and the process of making art. There, in one of the great ateliers of the world, he interacted with fellow artists and expanded his creative imagination into the areas for which he is best known today. He explored the use of politics, society, history, media, news, and the so-called trivial world of comics, advertising, and rock and roll as a means of addressing in his work the subject matter of war, violence, and a manipulative ruling society. Building on painting and drawing, the foundation of his work, he added the medium of photography. At this time he also became interested in taking his art out into the streets and confronting the world in an a form of art called Aktions, which now is generally referred to as performance art. All these pursuits interacted in Helnwein’s work, with a photograph inspiring a watercolor or a painting inspiring an Aktion. The result is a multi-layered body of work that delivers in a variety of mediums the same message of resistance and challenge to the dysfunctional post-war society in which Helnwein came of age.

A fully illustrated catalogue printed in color with black and white documentary illustrations will be available in the Museum Stores. 152 pages, approximately 70 images; 9" x 12". Cloth edition with special binding.

www.thinker.org/fam

Contact Information
Barbara Traisman
btraisman@famsf.org
415.750.3620

www.famsf.org

Selected reviews:

San Francisco Chronicle, 17. November 2004
Steven Winn
Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
Gottfried Helnwein's work is on display at the Legion of Honor and at Modernism Inc.
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.

San Francisco Chronicle, Steven Winn, 17. November 2004

San Francisco Chronicle, 9 August, 2004
Kenneth Baker
Chronicle Art Critic
The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein at San Francisco Fine Arts museums, Palace of the Legion of Honor.
Helnwein's preoccupation with the dark side of modern history, including its abuse of images, has never left him. He did a whole series of paintings (the Legion show includes a couple) so dark as to appear imageless. But he intended them not as mirrors of dark times but as counterthrusts to the aggressive reach of so much contemporary culture.
Despite the grotesquerie it contains, the Legion show also has elements of pathos.
Helnwein nodded yes when asked whether he has made a theme of innocence. "It's a dangerous word, it's so abused and misused, but yes that's probably the basic essence of what I'm interested in."
"As soon as somebody's grown up they have so many issues," he said. "When you look at a person -- what social level, what country they're from, what fashion they affect -- all this stuff comes in, but I'm interested in the stage of a human being where it's not so important whether it's a male or female, before we can tell any social background or anything, it's just ... abstract, almost."
...Probably few visitors will appreciate the detachment in Helnwein's work. They will more likely respond to his concern with the power of images. We willingly subject ourselves to their power every day without really understanding it. If nothing else, his pictures, no matter how confrontational, stand still and permit us, even defy us, to understand how they work upon us.

San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic, 9 August, 2004

THOUGHT-PROVOKING ART BY HELNWEIN DISTURBS IN REMARKABLE SAN FRANCISCO SHOW
The Mercury News, 04. August 2004
Anita Amirrezvani
A new exhibit called "The Child," through Nov. 28 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, presents images of distressed, wounded or threatened children, a topic that has fascinated Helnwein for years.
Many of the children depicted in the show have deformities, bandages, scars or wounds; some appear threatened by menacing adults or by mayhem. Their suffering, indeed wrenching to witness, inevitably becomes a statement about the human condition.
A 55-year-old father of four, Helnwein sees himself as an artist with a message. "A big part of contemporary art is not connected to anything," he said. "It's important for certain artists to respond to what's going on in present time."
Curator Robert Flynn Johnson believes it is appropriate to display art with a moral message. "Museums shouldn't be like Rip Van Winkle, in a state of catatonic sleep," he says. "They should take on issues. Otherwise they will be seen just as a low-grade entertainment vehicle. We're not out to shock -- we're out to make people think."
Johnson places Helnwein in the tradition of such contemporary activist artists as filmmakers Michael Moore ("Fahrenheit 9/11") and Errol Morris ("The Fog of War"), painter Gerhard Richter and painter Sue Coe, whose "deadmeat prints" include images of animal slaughter.
Museum officials have posted notices in the museum lobby and outside the gallery to warn people that viewer discretion is advised.
Officials at the Legion hope the exhibit will reach an audience that more typically comes to blockbuster shows on classical Egypt or the Old Masters. "If I do a show like this one that upsets the docents,"Johnson says, "I know that I've got a good show."

INNOCENCE LOST, Anita Amirrezvani, The Mercury News

sf-station San Francisco, 10. August 2004
Nirmala Nataraj
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.

Gottfried Helnwein's The Child - sf-station , San Francisco, Nirmala Nataraj

More reviews:

The Child - works by Gottfried Helnwein, San Francisco Fine Arts Museums
Summary of reviews and texts
The Child- ゴットフリード・ヘルンウｪイン（Gottfried Helnwein）
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。

THE CHILD EXHIBITION - 127,000 VISITORS- THE REVIEWS

Palace of the Legion of Honor
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Palace of the Legion of Honor

www.gottfried-helnwein-child.com

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