(Vienna 1928–2000 Pacific Ocean, on board the Queen Elizabeth II.)
„Bäume in Grau“, 1950, illegibly signed, watercolor and charcoal on paper, 61.5 x 43 cm, framed

On the reverse A drawing in pencil (portrait) probably by Huntertwasser.

Andrea Fürst and Joram Harel (Hundertwasser Archive) have seen the work in April 2024.

Illustrated and listed:
Andrea Fürst, Hundertwasser 1928–2000, catalog raisonné, volume II, Taschen 2002, no. 93

Published in exhibition catalog:
Hundertwasser, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, 1964, p. 104

Provenance:
Private Collection, Vienna

Loan Frame

Dear Friends,
Today is May 12, 1982. I am in New Zealand.
It is already pretty cold here by now, May being about what November is in Europe. It is now a quarter past ten in the evening; in Vienna it is a quarter past noon. Here everything is the other way round. Here you see the Southern Cross, warmth comes from the north, cold from the south. You are surely wondering why I am staying away so long, but the main reason for it is that I don’t think one can learn anything at the Academy; only the weak go to the Academy; only the weak think they can study art, that they can learn art. Either you have it in you like an inspiration which suddenly comes, or you look and look and usually don’t find it. Either you have the gifts you have been endowed with already as a child, from birth, or you don’t. But if you have these gifts, you run the greatest risk at the Academy or at any school or any association with other people of losing the most precious of all the assets in your possession: of losing your own self. But if you have not found your own self or have lost it and want to recover it, the Academy is the worst possible place.
For there you are exposed to influences which do not fit you, and there is a very great danger of adopting something which you then imagine to be yourself, as it were, that you recognise yourself in the knowledge and actions of other people, that you identify with something that is not yourself, with something you would like to be but aren’t and then suffer from it all your life.
It is as if you had put on a false skin or donned clothes which don’t fit and now wanted to grow into these clothes, so to speak.

That is why I told you at the outset, as you’ll recall, to bring in your own childhood drawings. Everyone should begin at the point where he was still himself, before he was inundated, before he was alienated, by his parental home, by the system of upbringing, by school, by the customary ways of our civilisation.
For one can only continue building from the ground up. That is the only solid, secure, unshakeable basis, one’s own origins. It is irrelevant what these childhood drawings look like. One can only build on this basis; otherwise it is a castle in the air, a house of cards which will collapse. You can’t build by putting heavy bricks on flimsy matchboxes.

…. The next question is why I put trees in the classrooms. It is perfectly clear: art and nature have a lot to do with one another.
Art is the bridge between man and nature. Art is not the bridge between people. What art is, must be worked out by everyone for himself in a dialogue with nature. Man cannot be creative the way creation was, the way God creates trees, nature, plants, brings forth flowers, brings forth worlds which then go on existing of their own accord and, thanks to an incredible diversity, have a raison d’être of their own and form an interlinking clock-work: man cannot do that, no matter how much he exerts his intellect. On the contrary, the harder he exerts his intellect, the less progress is made. Man only makes progress when he lets other things work, apart from his intellect. His intellect should only be a cause for him to control himself, but not to be haughty towards nature…

Hundertwasser to the Students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, May 1982