(born Baden near Vienna in 1929)
Untitled (overpainting), 1955, oil on canvas, 53 x 42.5 cm, framed, (K)

Provenance:
Formerly the property of Josef Mikl
Hassfurther auction: Wien nach 1945, Hotel Hilton, Vienna, 2 Dec.1989, catalogue no. 32, full page colour ill.
Private Collection, Switzerland

From the catalogue page above, with illustration and in Rainer’s hand:
The painted surface shown here was a particular fragment destined for destruction, having been rejected for artistic reasons, SIGNING as my work cannot follow in this state. However, I am prepared to overpaint. Vienna 6. XII.89 A. Rainer’s overpainting suggestions followed (see catalogue Part II no. 982, 983) in a letter:

Vienna 6.6.1990
I refer to Mr Rainer’s letter of 15 March.
He has overpainted the colour reproduction from the Hassfurther catalogue twice and is sending you a coloured copy of each variation. As already mentioned in his letter, the price for overpainting the colour reproduction is ATS 33,600. Please let me know which variation you decide on.
I look forward to hearing from you and remain,
Yours
Gabriele Wimmer
Atelier Arnulf Rainer

Catalogue page with handwritten note and 2 letters, one including a cost estimate for overpainting the painting, issued by the Atelier Arnulf Rainer, Vienna 15.3.1990 and one from 6.6.1990.

I am still revising these paintings even today, steadily approaching complete blacking out, although I have long since forgotten what lay beneath. My favourite activity is overpainting an overpainting. I never wanted to destroy, but instead to perfect. I needed a certain positive contact to the overpainted image. Although not exclusively, I perform my artistic work primarily as a soliloquy. Just as a dream continues during deep sleep, overpainting is the development of this soliloquy into silence. A. R.1970

Are you still working on earlier paintings? In 1971 you noted that paintings are not for you to look at, but something to alter.
Only on works made in recent years. I leave earlier works just as they are. I can no longer rediscover the feeling associated with the shapes and energy from those days.
From: Arnulf Rainer in conversation with Antonia Hoerschelmann – Rätsel der Zusammenhänge, Vienna, 20 May 2014
Both texts from: Arnulf Rainer, catalogue of the Albertina, Vienna, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, published by Buchhandlung Walther König, 2014 Hundertwasser und Rainer

A Viennese memory
While painting his work ‘Der Dampfer von Hokkaido’ in a ryokan in 1961, Hundertwasser remembered ten painters of his time whose work he held in particularly high esteem. He entered their names into an irregularly bordered space in the green of the bow between the portholes. The list begins with Brauer, followed by Schröder-Sonnenstern, Dali, Fuchs, Picasso, Hausner, Lehmden, Rainer, and the two late surrealists, Biasi and Hantai.
Picasso and Dali represented art history. Schröder-Sonnenstern is the ingenue who he met in Berlin and whose drawings in coloured pencil he always supported. He became acquainted with the works of Biasi and Hantai during his early years in Paris. All the other names, however, relate to his beginnings in Vienna, of the situation around 1950, of names and paintings which would move him most at that time, representing such a departure from his own visual world. Even from a distance of more than a decade, his thoughts return to this starting point, circling him again and again…
And then we have the name Arnulf Rainer, a painter whose pull is greater than all the others, whose paintings both fascinate and shock him, drawing him in, repulsing him, and then drawing him closer again, in which he discovers the spirit of the avantgarde. Arnulf Rainer becomes something of an opponent, against whom he measures himself, admiring and withdrawing from him. In the 1960s he would telegraph him from Venice on the opening of an

Exhibition:
‘Greetings, giant’… Wieland Schmied from: Arnulf Rainer, Retrospektive 1950–1977, catalogue 5/1977, Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover