The Art of the Viennese Walls : Foe of city gray: Hundertwasser’s work makes even Gaudi dowdy

Humans have more than just eyes to enjoy beautiful things and ears to hear beautiful sounds and noses to smell beautiful smells. Humans can also feel with their hands and feet. The flat floor with straight lines has been recognized as a real danger to humans. The uneven path becomes a symphony, a melody for the feet. This path makes one vibrate with joy.

--Friedensreich Hundertwasser

*

I was sitting in the cafe of the Kunsthaus Wien, which must be the most disorienting museum in the world. When I looked at the floor, I saw it rise and dip like sand dunes, and when I looked at the multicolored ceramic pillars, they seemed to tilt dangerously. Yet this uncertainty delighted me, for I had made a journey of 24 years to get here.

The Kunsthaus Wien is the Vienna museum designed by and devoted to the art of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, one of Austria’s best known artists and architects, although his name is relatively unknown in America outside art circles.

I was living in New Zealand when I first heard of Hundertwasser. In 1973 he brought an exhibit of his prints to Wellington’s Dominion Museum. Tall and bearded, in a flannel shirt and hiking boots, Hundertwasser looked like a woodcutter returned from the forest. I had no idea at the time that he would become an Austrian icon, and that his museum and buildings he designed would be listed as important Vienna landmarks, top tourist attractions listed alongside the Spanish Riding School and the Schonbrunn Palace.

At the exhibit, I fell in love with Hundertwasser’s shimmering fantasies with intriguing titles: “Blood Flowing in a Circle and I Have a Bicycle” or “The Painters Have Houses to Pray but Do Not Use Them.” I bought a small book about the artist and over the years have returned to it, each time gaining new insight into the mind of a nonconformist who rails against the dehumanizing of our environment.

Hundertwasser celebrates the handmade and the organic, but he also reveres that which is childlike and rebellious. Calling himself an “architect doctor,” he has both shocked and delighted his compatriots by turning mundane buildings into colorful, toylike fantasies. In Vienna, the Spittelau District Heating Plant, for example, was transformed into a psychedelic mosque with a dazzling gold minaret. The Bad Fischau Highway Inn, a prefab 1950s diner 45 miles south of Vienna, is now topped by Hundertwasser’s blue octagonal observation tower, which in turn is topped by a live fir tree. The artist has also painted rainbow colors on an old 12-ton freighter, which he calls Rainy Day and which serves as his second home on the Danube.

However, there’s no better example of his bold spirit than the Hundertwasser House, a Vienna public housing project before it was redesigned inside and out by Hundertwasser and reopened in 1985, the building was a dreary gray-brick tenement. I was so eager to see this structure, that when I arrived in Vienna I headed straight for it, completely forgetting to bring my map. Yet in the trim, middle-class neighborhood of Hapsburg-era houses, there was no way to miss it.

Pundits have remarked that a Hundertwasser building looks like circus clowns were let loose with giant crayons. When I arrived, I stood on the sidewalk opposite the apartment building, astonished by blue, orange, yellow, white and brown walls, wavy roofs planted with mini-meadows and crowned with gold onion domes, a concrete arch decorated with mirror fragments, multicolored tiles that float over the walls like party streamers, and hundreds of gaily painted small windows so unexpectedly placed that they look like a stamp collection dropped from heaven.

On the cornices, window sills and gables of the apartment rise an odd assortment of statuary: bright yellow bowling pins, Greek goddesses, lions, red Santa hats. And as if all this weren’t enough, trees sprout from the windows. These “tree tenants,” as Hundertwasser calls them, exemplify his philosophy of returning greenery to the city.

*

Now 68, Hundertwasser is as eccentric and rebellious as ever. He has written numerous treatises railing against drab color and the “godless straight line.” In one, called the Manifesto of Tenant’s Rights, he recites his idiosyncratic philosophy of human liberation, a tract that reads like a collaboration of Karl Marx and the Mad Hatter:

Renters must be able to lean out of their windows and scratch off all the plaster within reach. And they must be permitted to paint everything pink within reach of a long brush so that it can be seen from a distance, from the street that a human lives there!

If the exterior of the Hundertwasser House would make Gaudi look dowdy, the interior is just as fanciful. The staircase weaves as in a fun house. The trail to the apartment house cafe is embedded with pieces of gravestone, and a play center, called the Adventure Room, has a floor that not only sports a window, but undulates so much that kids use it as a slide--that is, when they’re not drawing on the walls. As Hundertwasser’s manifesto proclaims: “Children must be able to scribble, paint and scratch all public walls as high as their arms can reach.”

Wildly painted bathrooms abound with pelicans, cactuses, butterflies and “tile graffiti,” the artistry of individual tilers.

Walls that roll in and out like sea waves, an underground garage where each parking space is marked by a different flower mosaic, and coats of arms from demolished buildings are just some of the eye-tickling features of this unique dwelling.

*

The Hundertwasser House whetted my appetite for more things wild and witty. I was in luck, for the Kunsthaus Wien, Hundertwasser’s four-story museum dedicated to himself, is just two streets away.

As unconventional as the apartment building, the museum also houses temporary exhibits and serves as a gathering place for artists. On the day I visited last November, it was crowded with schoolchildren and tourists. I squeezed my way through them to buy a ticket and saw that it was an odd shape, made of very thick cardboard and printed on both sides with a picture of the museum that twinkled in the daylight. I stuck it in my purse to keep as a souvenir, then proceeded upstairs to the first floor where I found many of the original paintings and prints I had so loved in New Zealand.

Hundertwasser’s paintings are characterized by Oriental decorativeness, luxurious color and rich texture--paintings that seem influenced both by Austria’s Baroque and Vienna’s Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) periods.

Born in Vienna in 1928 as Friedrich Stowasser, Hundertwasser at the age of 22 gave himself the name “Hundred Waters” and had his first exhibit in Paris. Early on, architecture played a large part in his paintings. One of his best known, “The Houses Are Hanging Underneath the Meadows,” for example, conveys his idea that the “horizontal belongs to nature; the vertical to man.” The picture, which hangs in the Kunsthaus, shows a ziggurat planted with gardens and a building with each floor and roof turned into a meadow. The idea was that if humans were to build like this, an aerial landscape would show an unaltered terrain--every horizontal surface planted with greenery. Railing against the grayness of most architecture, Hundertwasser’s paintings show worlds that contain hundreds of colors; he believes that diversity of color is symbolic of paradise.

In the early ‘60s, Hundertwasser collaborated with Japanese master woodblock printers, learning to employ both traditional Japanese perspective and calligraphy into his works. Eschewing store-bought paints as too thin, he makes his own by grinding bricks, volcanic sand, earth, coal and white lime, then mixing them with egg or acrylic or wax. The result is paint that’s rougher in texture and contains what he calls “more soul.”

Hundertwasser’s technical originality challenged the very printing process itself. In the late ‘60s, he introduced into graphic printing the use of phosphorescent and fluorescent colors as well as metal embossing, techniques that have now become his signature. Hundertwasser used these techniques to the utmost in one of his most famous images, “Irinaland Over the Balkans,” which can also be seen in the Kunsthaus. The image shows a woman’s face floating over the countryside, her omnipresence symbolizing an obsessive memory for a lost love.

I wandered through the museum, hypnotized by the brilliant colors and luminescence of the pictures. Framed by wide black mats and black frames, and strategically spotlighted, the pictures appear to float in space.

The Kunsthaus Wien’s top floor has yet more drawings, plus a garden fountain that recycles its own water. There’s also a display of the flags and stamps Hundertwasser created. Here too visitors can see the models and designs he has done for a host of other buildings such as the grain silo of Krems, Austria; the Rupertinum Museum in Salzburg, Austria; the Rosenthal factory in Selb, Germany; and the Beaux Arts Museum in Brussels.

His most recent design is a fairy-tale-like spa-resort scheduled to open May 10 in the small town of Blumau, a 1 1/2-hour drive south of Vienna. Called Rogner-Bad Blumau, the resort, developed by Austria’s Rogner International hotel chain, bills itself as the “world’s largest habitable work of art” and features Hundertwasser’s signature design elements--undulating walls, bright colors and onion domes--as well as golf, swimming pools and health treatments.

*

I had wound my way up and around the Kunsthaus museum but at last, leg-weary, I made my way down the steep spiraling stairs to the cafe to have a coffee, where I found that sitting at a table on an undulating floor has one distinct disadvantage. My chair wobbled madly, without warning, tipping me backward or pitching me forward, and sloshing my coffee into a saucer puddle.

On my way out I stopped by the museum gift shop filled with Hundertwasser objets d’art. Here one can buy Hundertwasser umbrellas, earrings, necklaces, mugs, scarves, pens, puzzles, postcards, calendars, key chains, tea sets and ties. I walked out of the museum, turned a corner and came again upon city streets lined with Hapsburg houses that now seemed to me as gray and somber as a row of soldiers.

That night I began to read my new Hundertwasser book, and learned too late that the thick museum tickets were designed by Hundertwasser to serve as wedges under the cafe chair legs.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: Hundertwasser’s Vienna

Getting there: There are no nonstop flights to Vienna, but Delta, Swissair, Lufthansa, Air France, KLM and British Air offer connecting service involving a change of planes. Advance-purchase, restricted round-trip coach fares start at $1,093.

Seeing Hundertwasser’s art: The Kunsthaus Wien (13 Untere Weissgerberstrasse; local telephone 712-0491) is open daily, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; admission about $8. Take streetcar N or O to Radetzkyplatz.

Visitors can view the exterior of the Hundertwasser House at the corner of Kegelgasse and Lowengasse (subway stop: Schwedenplatz, then streetcar N to Hetzgasse). The apartment house’s interior, however, is open by appointment only through the Kunsthaus Wien.

A Hundertwasser tour by riverboat along the Danube also stops at Hundertwasser House, Kunsthaus Wien and Spittelau, as well as other Vienna architectural sites. An all-day ticket aboard the M.S. Vindobona costs about $12 per adult. Departures from the DDSG Station in Schwedenbrucke at Schwedenplatz four times daily.

For information/reservations at the Hundertwasser-designed Rogner-Bad Blumau resort-spa south of Vienna, tel. 011-43-1-802-2341, fax 011-43-1-802-2477. Double rooms are about $191.

For more information: Austrian National Tourist Office, 1142 Times Square, New York, NY 10018-1143; (212) 944-6880, fax (212) 730-4568.