Robert Fleck: KO Götz West Hundertwasser

How the maxim of making a work of art out of one's life gives rise to fruitful and good art

As surprising as the series KO Götz (1914-2017), Franz West (1947-2012) and Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) may seem - above all because their art is so very different - these artists, who Robert Fleck visited over many years and in some cases became friends with, are united by their unusual lives and their individual artistic personalities. At their best, the lives of artists have always been the stuff of great stories, even great literature; the opposite is true of gossip, which is often fuelled by jealousy, but what both narrative patterns have in common is the basic idea that artists are great figures who are capable of achieving superhuman things - geniuses. In this book, Robert Fleck approaches the lives of the three artists with humour and empathy and shows how they have repeatedly undermined the widespread myth about being an artist. In the case of KO Götz, for example, the doyen of Art Informel, it is hardly known how he resisted the role of the artist as a bohemian in the post-war years since 1945 and also took an almost diametrically opposed path in life as a poet and scientist. Or Franz West, who throughout his life seemed to be interested in cultivating his beginnings in the Viennese art scene as a "sandler", because in this way he was able to attract an important entourage in an inimitable way. Friedensreich Hundertwasser, on the other hand, already began to paint the picture of a cultish prophet with his first actions in the early 1960s. The alternative scene of the 1980s was only too happy to admire him as one of the signal artists alongside Joseph Beuys, but he became a pariah among his colleagues - quite contrary to Beuys' effect - even though he not only talked about ecological dimensions, but also worked seriously on their realisation. Robert Fleck has maintained close contact with all three artists over the years: For example, the author helped the young Franz West to sell his painted-over newspaper collages in Viennese pubs; and he subsequently visited 103-year-old KO Götz, whom he had already interviewed in the 1990s, again and again, most recently at the beginning of 2017, a few months before the latter's death. Finally, with Friedensreich Hundertwasser, about whom Robert Fleck last published in 2016 ("Kunst und Natur. Hundertwasser, New Zealand and the Design of an Aesthetic Ecology"), he was not only in close contact with the artist in the last years of his life, but was probably also one of the few people who was able to have a lengthy exchange of ideas with him, when he was otherwise known for his monosyllabic behaviour and silence. Taken together, all three portraits drawn by Robert Fleck as an independent author show in a wondrously open way how the creative project of modern man, especially the artist, is not only difficult, but must be defended again and again by its protagonists in self-defence against all attempts at appropriation.