Hundertwasser's comment on the work

Having come down with jaundice - itterizia in Italian, hepatitis - I lay in a huge hall, similar to the Sistine Chapel, with enormous frescoes all around me. Just about every day a patient died. The prayers of the nuns - they all had to join in the singing - echoed like in a big cathedral. I painted most assiduously in bed and began to give my pictures titles and to number them in my head - it was my first ?uvre catalogue, for which I wrote important texts, treatises, philosophy - I was never so industrious. Before that I had been ill. (I lived with the painters Peverelli and Giorgio de Gaspari, an ingenious draughtsman and terrific person who became a good friend thirty years later in Palestrina.) My urine was black and my stool white. The Austrian Consulate was unwilling to help this vagabond who had just popped up. A doctor finally referred me to the Vatican. The Church saved my life twice. The first time it was the Merciful Brothers (Barmherzige Brüder) in Vienna in 1945, and then the Vatican Hospital in Rome. I have to say that every time somebody starts criticising the Catholic Church and its institutions. An opened envelope is an arrow. In the arrow itself there are contradictory tendencies, which by no means always go in the direction of the arrow. For this to develop to a direction for the arrow at all, untold inward cramps are necessary. (from: Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 269)