Robert FleckKO Götz West Hundertwasser

How fruitful and good art arises from the maxim of making a work of art out of one’s own life! However surprising the sequence KO Götz (1914–2017), Franz West (1947–2012) and Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000) may appear – not least because their art is so entirely different – these artists, whom Robert Fleck visited over many years and with some of whom he was on friendly terms, are united by their unusual paths through life and by the solitary artistic personality of each. At best, the lives of artists have always furnished material for great stories, even for great literature; the opposite characterises the gossip so often fuelled by petty jealousies. Common to both narrative patterns, however, is the underlying notion that artists are great figures capable of superhuman achievements – geniuses, in short. In this book Robert Fleck approaches the lives of the three artists with wit and empathy, showing how they repeatedly undermined the widespread fable of the artist’s existence. In the case of KO Götz, the doyen of Art Informel, for example, it is hardly known how he resisted the role of the artist as bohemian in the post-war years from 1945 onwards and took an almost diametrically opposed path in life, as a poet and a scholar as well. Or Franz West, who all his life seemed concerned to cultivate his beginnings in the Vienna art scene as a “Sandler,” because in this inimitable way he bound a weighty entourage to himself. Friedensreich Hundertwasser, by contrast, began as early as his first actions in the early 1960s to draw a picture of himself as a cultic prophet, whom the alternative scene of the 1980s was only too glad to admire as one of the signal artists alongside Joseph Beuys, but who in the process became a pariah among his colleagues – quite contrary to the effect Beuys had – although he did not merely advocate ecological dimensions but worked in earnest on their realisation. Robert Fleck was connected with all three artists by intensive contact over the years: the author helped the young Franz West to sell his overpainted newspaper collages in the inns of Vienna; and he visited the 103-year-old KO Götz, whom he had already interviewed in the 1990s, again and again thereafter, most recently at the beginning of 2017, a few months before his death. With Friedensreich Hundertwasser, finally, on whom Robert Fleck last published in 2016 (“Kunst und Natur. Hundertwasser, Neuseeland und der Entwurf einer ästhetischen Ökologie”), he not only maintained intensive contact during the artist’s last years, but was probably also one of the few privileged to conduct a more sustained exchange of ideas with him, given that Hundertwasser was otherwise known for his monosyllabic manner and his silence. Taken together, all three portraits, drawn by Robert Fleck as an independent author, show in wonderfully open fashion how the creative project of modern man, and of the artist in particular, is not merely arduous but has to be defended by its protagonists again and again, virtually in self-defence, against attempts at appropriation from all sides.