(born in Baden near Vienna in 1929)
‘Van Gogh in dunkler Glorie’, from the Van Gogh cycle, monogrammed, dated R 1979 and titled, oil on photograph, 59.7 x 47.5 cm, framed, (K)

Watch Video: Contemporary Art | November 2015 | Austrian and German Artists

Illustrated (full-page) in:
Arnulf Rainer,... ALS VAN GOGH ALS..., Galerie van de Loo, Munich 1980, plate 18

See:
Arnulf Rainer, Albertina Wien/Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, 2015, published by Buchhandlung Walther König, pp. 137–141

Provenance:
Galerie van de Loo, Munich
Galerie Georg Nothelfer, Berlin (label on the covering board)
Private Collection, Germany

It goes back a long time, that I absolutely had to paint van Gogh or portray him metaphorically. It all began in 1948 with the portrait drawing, ‘Wie, van Gogh in Gottes Ohr?’.
At that time I was still very scrupulous and burned this self-aberration. In 1949/50, I then drew myself in the style of Archimboldo’s vegetable portraits as an incarnation of Vincent, naturally only concealed, smuggled, and unrecognisable to my secondary school teachers. In addition, there were paraphrases as hermaphrodite, ear-emphasiser, two-headed figure, doppelganger, martyr, damsel, Jesus, wraith, resurrected one, fallen one, epilectic. In 1968 I created a large drawing with the title, ‘van Gogh als Jagdfieber’ (when I was twelve I wanted to be a pilot).
Since that time, at the latest, I combined two youthful ideals and associated myself with van Gogh. This is the well-known Napoleon complex, the calculated delusion of grandeur, the profit of genius, the bellwether search of a non-equivalent...
A secondary drive should also be mentioned: I am snowed in, and suffer from my covering myself up, I am shy and don’t like to expose myself to others. So, I developed a counterstrategy, which I put into practice in my work. I can’t cope with weakness: I lose myself and branch out too much, and don’t know where the current is, where the trunk is. Probably I am not a tree, like other artists, at all, but only a straggly shrub that continuously has to examine all possible branches. Let’s continue with the style of listing pertinent keywords.
This cycle of the reworked, van Gogh-like self-portraits contains aspects such as:
loss of self self-transformation,
compulsion to self-mobility,
affectation of ego transcendence,
auto-theatre,
the feigned extinction of the self,
the interest in new self-inventions,
the dread of the archenemy in one’s own belly,
the sympathy with the archenemy in one’s own breast,
the occupation with the relaxation of the arteries of the brain,
the mixtures of roles of the eclectics,
the yearned-for genius,
the presumption of the euphorigenic, ...
the listing can stop now. I can’t find an overall description which is perfectly applicable for me. Others can perhaps guess at my personal motivation, as I myself am missing the point. I am still asking myself, why all of this? In any event, also with this van Gogh series as with every other series of works, be they smearings, mask images, photo poses, over-drawings, repaintings, blind scratchings, representations of the dead (and also self-commentaries), I am trying, without ever finishing or qualifying,
-to gather myself together,
-to stick myself together.
Arnulf Rainer Passau-Wien, March 1980 from:... ALS VAN GOGH ALS... oder der Versuch meinen permanenten Zerfall aufzuhalten.