New loans from Switzerland at the KunstHausWien

20. May 2022
374 Automobile with red raindrops IV
We are pleased about three permanent loans from a collector family who is now sharing their treasures with the public.
For the first time on show in Vienna: 473 TWO CLOUDS WITH FEET BREEDING SEVEN COLOURS and 374 AUTOMOBILE WITH RED RAINDROPS IV, watercolour, 1958
Hundertwasser about the red raindrops: At the time I was having a dispute with a critic in Vienna. To make Tachism comprehensible to him - (…) - I wanted to prove how beautiful it would be if the rain fell in red drops. (…) These red splotches on the picture are not spilled paint, they are painted. I probably did let the core of the drops simply drop onto the paper, sure, but the edging around the individual drops is painted. (…) At the time I was pre-occupied with the problem of Tachism. I felt it was a major turning point. But I never succumbed to Tachism, I solved it like here in this picture. I am of the opinion that rain is Tachism to perfection. Only people don't see that correctly, unfortunately, for when it rains longer, everything gets equally wet. But if you could colour rain red and interrupt the rain after the first drops, you would have a perfect Tachistic doctrine of form. (from: Hundertwasser, Buchheim Verlag, Feldafing, 1964 and ed. 1973, p. 34)
The watercolor 473 TWO CLOUDS WITH FEET BREEDING SEVEN COLOURS was painted during Hundertwasser's stay in Japan in 1961.
198 Free and Imprisoned Flowers in the City: Hundertwasser painted this watercolor in the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. He was there in the fall of 1954 when he was suffering from jaundice. I painted most assiduously in bed and began to give my pictures titles and to number them in my head - it was my first œuvre catalogue, for which I wrote important texts, treatises, philosophy - I was never so industrious.
473 Two clouds with feet breeding seven colours
198 Free and Imprisoned Flowers in the City. The watercolour was exhibited at the Leopold Museum in 2020.