Hundertwasser's comment on the work

Hans Neuffer was a very young man when I saw a most unusual self-portrait of his in a bookshop, which impressed me very much. I asked who it was and got to know him. His pictures were beyond all norms; some of them were even painted on newspapers (!) and surely unacceptable to any art connoisseur. He was gangly, with big hands, came from a bourgeois family and wanted to be anything but bourgeois. Through him I later got to know Udo Proksch, who was a much shadier character. Both did things which defied all convention. I made a bet with Udo and Neuffer: who would gain more influence and wield more power, me with my painting or they with money, politics and weapons. Udo is serving a life sentence, and Neuffer died a bizarre death. Who won the bet? As to Udo Proksch, he was convicted of sinking the ship Lucona in the Indian Ocean in an insurance-fraud scheme, and six seamen drowned. I must truthfully say to all this that there must be two souls in his breast. He used his position as a darling of the Austrian government to do good things, too, e.g., to prevent a police raid on the squatters in the wetlands (Hainburg, 1984, editor's note). I also have him to thank for helping to speed up arranging my meetings with Chancellor Kreisky and Mayor Gratz concerning the construction of the Hundertwasser House. So I have been connected directly or indirectly with four boats: the Rossauerlände ferry, the S.S. Bauta, on which I was a seaman, the Regentag, with which I sailed to New Zealand and, albeit from a distance, the Lucona. (from: Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 771)