Detail

This small painting by the Austrian painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser is entitled “La fuseé vegetale des anciens maîtres” or “The Old Masters‘ Vegetable Rocket.” The central elements of the picture look like a tree with a trunk and a round crown. There are two nearly round shapes along a central axis, to which thin circles and spirals are attached. Spiral shapes are important in Hundertwasser‘s work. From 1953 on, he painted them again and again, and said: “A real and true spiral is not geometrical but vegetable, it has lumps and becomes thinner or thicker, and it flows past obstacles that get in its way.” The title mentions the old masters, which nearly every young artist feels obliged to explore and question. Artists copy the old themes and techniques, changing them and placing them in new contexts. Hundertwasser himself uses an “old-fashioned” mixed media technique. He first grounds the packing paper and then applies layers of watercolor. Then he adds a layer of varnish and then finally mounts the picture on canvas. The theme of the “rocket” was highly topical in 1956, the year this work was painted, as the future of manned space flight was a popular theme both among experts and in popular magazines and newspapers. In this year, China founded its space agency, and in Europe universities began to establish programs in space rocket technology. Just one year before the first satellite orbited the earth, and the Western world was to talk of the Sputnik shock, Hundertwasser painted his vegetable rocket in Paris. It is an intensely colorful counterpart to the technical sobriety of his contemporaries’ dreams of space travel. “Perhaps I would like to be seen as a magician of vegetation or something like that, the magic is that I fill up a painting until it is full of magic, just like you fill a glass with water,” said Friedensreich Hundertwasser.