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Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer died on December 18 at the age of 96. He was one of Austria’s most influential avant-garde artists of the 20th century.
He developed the painterly foundations of his work as a self-taught artist in the early 1950s, after leaving the Academy of Applied Arts and the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1949 after only a few days. After beginning with surrealism and experimenting with psychic automatism and blind drawing, he soon arrived at gestural abstract painting. From 1954 onwards, he developed the characteristic blackenings, “overpaintings” and “overdrawings” that were to become his trademark.
Initially, Rainer used used canvases and his own works. Towards the end of the 1950s, when he began to rework the works of others – initially in agreement with artist friends – his “overpainting” became a deliberate provocation of the art world. Rainer became a public enemy in this country too when he was awarded an art prize in Wolfsburg.
The unauthorized painting over of the award-winning graphic left the audience in the Bürgerhalle of Volkswagenstadt speechless and earned the painter his first arrest. Arnulf Rainer was represented three times in a row at documenta in Kassel with paintings, drawings on photographs and reproductions, and “hand paintings.” Harald Szeemann showed his work at documenta 5 (1972), Manfred Schneckenburger at documenta 6 (1977), and Rudi Fuchs at documenta 7 (1982). He had a close friendship with Fuchs. The Dutch exhibition organizer presented him repeatedly: in 1980 at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and in 1989 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, he dedicated retrospectives to Rainer.
In 1978, Rainer, whose career began as the enfant terrible of the Viennese art scene, represented the Republic of Austria at the Venice Biennale at the invitation of Werner Hofmann and Hans Hollein. In the same year, he was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize for Fine Arts. Since 2009, the Arnulf Rainer Museum in his hometown of Baden near Vienna has been dedicated to his life’s work.
He had long since made detailed arrangements for the time after his death: his last will and testament was published in the summer of 1972 as an artist’s book entitled “Vermächtnis über meinen Nachlass” (Bequest of My Estate): The document, which was filed with the Vienna Inner City District Court and notarized (“drawn up in full consciousness and completely uninfluenced”), regulates the complete distribution of his works and assets among all collectors and supporters who enabled him to pursue his art during his lifetime: “I regret that I can no longer be present for this great distribution.”
