Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Origins and early life

Friedensreich Hundertwasser was born Friedrich Stowasser in Vienna on 15 December 1928; his father, Ernst Stowasser, a Catholic and a technician, died when he was a year old, and his mother, Elsa Scheuer, was Jewish — a fact he wrote about himself, in a text titled 'Between Hitler Youth and the Star of David', and on which this fiche rests.

Work and career

She had him baptized a Catholic in 1935 as a precaution, and after the Anschluss enrolled him in the Hitler Youth as camouflage; mother and son survived the war hidden in a cellar in Vienna, while his grandmother and aunt were deported and murdered, and some sixty-nine members of his mother's family were killed in the Holocaust. He spent three months at the Vienna Academy in 1948, took his new name in 1949 — Hundertwasser, 'hundred waters', later prefixed with Friedensreich, 'kingdom of peace' — and painted spirals, labyrinths and glowing cities in a style that owed something to Klimt and Schiele and nothing to the abstraction of his contemporaries.

In 1958 his Mould Manifesto declared war on the straight line and on rationalist architecture, 'the tool of the devil', and demanded the right of every tenant to lean out of the window and paint the wall as far as his arm could reach; he built that idea in the Hundertwasserhaus, the public housing block in Vienna completed in 1985, with its uneven floors, onion domes, trees growing from the windows and grass on the roof, and then in the Kunst Haus Wien, the Spittelau incinerator, the spa of Bad Blumau and buildings in Germany, Japan and New Zealand.

Later years

An ecological activist before the word was common, a designer of stamps and flags, he lived his last decades on a farm in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, died at sea on 19 February 2000 aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, and was buried there, without a coffin, under a tulip tree.