Austrian-born and educated and now living Los Angeles, Helnwein employs a hyperrealist manner that will remind Americans of Gerhard Richter but, if anything, works to opposite effect. Rather than re-confirm post-modernist cynicism, Helnwein rekindles post-war anguish. This selection, going back more than three decades, emphasizes his preoccupation with the image of the child, from early Nitsch- and Schwarzkogler-influenced photo-actions (with the requisite bandages) to recent large portrait-like heads and depictions of Christ-child-like babes attracting odd, menacing crowds. A perverse streak runs through the images, but it’s not pederasty: tinged with surrealism, it’s an enduring shame and anger at the Nazi past – and the artist’s suspicion that Naziism hasn’t been eradicated. ...

In the film "Ninth November Night," painter Gottfried Helnwein describes his first encounter with Jewish people during his childhood in Austria after the war, a bleak and dark period, one, he says, with no singing, no laughter. He was nine years old when he saw the two people walking down the street, very close together, walking quickly, looking down the whole time.
Helnwein became intrigued and wanted to know who they were. He asked everyone, all the adults, "Who are they?" But no one wanted to answer. Finally, someone said the word, one that he remembers the person had great difficulty saying-"Jews." ...

The film tells the story of famed Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, obsessed with a mission to use his art to preserve the memory of Holocaust persecutions. ...

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Depictions of tragedy and violence are often so powerful we may wish to avoid them entirely. Holocaust images and those of other persecutions tend to be rendered manageable by being circumscribed to memorials and museums, places that by their very design prepare us to receive them in hushed tones of historical concern. But confront these images in an unexpected context and one's reaction may be less predictable, especially if the content is not the vaguely safe images of Nazi horror, but the very symbols and propaganda that fed the rallying call of Hitler's death machine.
What is in fact the capacity of these symbols to move people? Artists can seem to teeter on the line of propriety in exploring this question. Helnwein, in particular, has been exploring this throughout his career. In one of his early exhibitions, in Germany in 1971, audience reaction encompassed the gamut of emotional reactions, from adulation and Führer worship at the sight of an oversized portrait of Hitler to violent rejection in the form of vandalism to sympathetic watercolor images of deformed and crippled children.

Helnwein was born in Austria in 1948 in a post-WWII culture unwilling to confront its wartime past. Humanist themes pervade Helnwein's work, but his approach is not one of pandering or niceties. From his earliest moments as an artist, Helnwein has sought to provoke and elicit "unexpected reactions that reveal the innermost held feelings and beliefs [of the viewer]," according to Alexander Borovsky, curator at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Some of the most powerful images that deal with Nazism and Holocaust themes are by Anselm Kiefer and Helnwein, although, Kiefer’s work differs considerably from Helnwein’s in his concern with the effect of German aggression on the national psyche and the complexities of German cultural heritage. Kiefer is known for evocative and soulful images of barren German landscapes. But Kiefer's and Helnwein’s work are both informed by the personal experience of growing up in a post-war German-speaking countries. ...

Lieber Freund.
Es freut mich, dass Ihre Ausstellung mit den berührenden und eindrucksvollen Kinderportraits im Wiesenthal-Center in L.A. gezeigt wurde und wünsche mir, dass Sie noch viele Menschen beeindrucken und zum Nachdenken anregen werden. ...

The dark days of World War II had a tremendous impact on the Jewish people and the entire world. The preservation of the memories of that period is the most crucial step in ensuring that history does not repeat itself. ...

On Sunday, November 9, at 7:00 p.m. the Museum of Tolerance commemorated the 65th anniversary of the infamous 1938 Nazi “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht) pogrom.
The Wiesenthal Center's observance of the 65th anniversary of "Kristallnacht" was highlighted by the presentation of the work of Gottfried Helnwein and the screening of "Ninth November Night," a documentary about the artist's commitment to remind the world of the Holocaust. ...

On Sunday, November 9, at 7:00 p.m. the Museum of Tolerance commemorates the 65th anniversary of the infamous 1938 Nazi “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht) program which targeted 1,000 synagogues in Germany and Austria and marked the beginning of the end of European Jewry.
The commemoration will be highlighted by the screening of a documentary by renowned Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein, 9th November Night, who has committed himself and his art to reminding the world of the Holocaust. The documentary is based upon his 1988 exhibit of seventeen children’s portraits that were displayed in commemoration of Kristallnacht in Cologne, Germany. Just days into the exhibit, these portraits were vandalized.. “The fury with which the neo-nazis reacted to these portraits is understandable inasmuch as it is the very same fury with which they have for years been fighting against The Diary of Anne Frank,” said famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. “The murder of children rouses abhorrence and conflict in every human, whether they are motivated by ideology or insanity. The urge to destroy has survived; the portraits bear witness to its rage.” ...

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.

Helnwein belongs to no movement. He is enslaved by no genre or aesthetic. His primary obligation is to be human. He's able to change people more as an artist than he could as a baker or a plumber. But one gets the sense that, were plumbing what the world required, and were that within the reach of his talent, he would, without a moment's hesitation, trade in his paint brush for a pipe wrench.
As it is, he uses an unusually broad range of tools, producing work of the first rank in painting, sculpture, performance, photography. The last of these he used as the basis for one of his most ambitious works to date: Ninth November Night, originally installed in Cologne in 1988 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

"I didn't want to use these historic photographs which are used too often," he has said, "those mountains of corpses that mean nothing anymore." He recognized that, as a society, we'd grown numb to them: Paradoxically, the more often we saw the Holocaust's human remains, the more indifferent we became. From Kristallnacht, there are many lessons to be learned, but one of them, perhaps the first, is that violence and apathy operate in a vicious circle, and that it takes precious little to start that cycle. Using the attempted assassination of a German diplomat by a Polish Jew as an excuse, Nazi Party officials sought to condemn the entire Hebrew race by giving German citizens a night of amnesty during which they might personally take revenge on any Jew in their midst. Homes were destroyed, Synagogues burned to the ground. Collectively culpable, the German people learned to overlook the excesses of one another and the criminal acts of their government. Violence begot apathy begot violence. For the attempted assassination of one German, the price was between five and six million Jewish lives.

That, of course, is an oversimplification. Yet it does not exaggerate the degree to which Nazi acts, following Hitler's behavior, were arbitrary. Rather than piling up bodies, Helnwein took that uncertainty, and used it to attack indifference in the present day.
Specifically, he photographed seventeen local children, all between the ages of six and seven, Jewish and Gentile, German and foreign. Some looked impassively at the camera. Others let their eyes fall shut. All had their faces smeared with a white powder, as if dusted with a deathly pallor. Their photos were printed on banners, each four meters high, set side-by-side on a hundred-meter-long train platform between the Cologne Cathedral and the Ludwig Museum. At the end was a white banner on which was printed in black the German word "SELEKTION". Next to it were a couple anatomical drawings taken from a certain Text Book of the Sub-Human, showing the difference in the shapes of the feet and buttocks of the "lower" and the "higher" race.

The implication was inescapable. Here, along a railway line that had once run trains to the concentration camps, was a selection of seventeen children, chosen for who-knows-what-reason, condemned to die. According to Helnwein, selektion "is the key word that describes the Nazi ethos: the idea that a small group of people can select or decide who is subhuman and who is superior." His memorial to Kristallnacht dramatizes that. ...