The Whirlpool of The Waters

It was a class the likes of which Hamburg's Art Academy had never known. For five days, to the constant serpentine sound of Arab music, the guest lecturer, a Viennese painter named Hundertwasser, and his delighted students worked at painting the longest line in the world. It spiraled across the floor, looped up the walls, curved across the ceiling, and would have swirled out the door, but by that time the academy had dismissed Hundertwasser. The line, estimates the artist, only got to be 20 miles long.

A stunt worthy of Gulley Jimson? Hundertwasser, 36, is not fictional and is twice as eccentric. He writes steamy manifestoes, the most famous of which praised rust, rot and decay as mankind's truest friends. Now living in Venice, he sometimes dresses like an unholy relic in caftan, brocaded jacket and boots, sometimes in a kimono to match his Japanese wife. He painted his Citroen sedan in varying hues of metallic violet and noted it in his life catalogue as his 445th work of art. The rest of his 611 recorded works are the product of a wise primitive in a modern age; they tend to be corrosively colored, rank as a humus heap, and scornful of straight lines (see opposite page).

Ten years ago even the largest of Hundertwasser's works could be bought for $10 apiece (Peggy Guggenheim paid $50 for hers). Today Hundertwasser has become Austria's hottest painter, selling his works to the Rothschilds, French Premier Pompidou and Andre Malraux at prices from $2,000 to $17,000. Currently, to Hundertwasser's delight, Vienna's Museum of the 20th Century is showing 120 of his works.

"Vienna made me," he says. By that, Hundertwasser means that he embodies in his work all the blend of crumbling worldliness and gooey sensuality of a Linzertorte. Like his native city, which lies on the fringes of the Western world, his work flirts with the Far East, draws from such predecessors as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt as well as the tendrilous enticements of Jugendstil or art nouveau. He mingles oils and tempera with gold and silver foil, beeswax, and bits of peat moss and sand to make his almost bitter, labyrinthine pastries.

But unlike the fading School of Paris surface-obsessed abstractionists, he plays with figurative analogies. And he broods over his titles as if they were poetic essays, giving to them all the multiple layers of meaning he intends his paintings to convey. Words, he believes, are important. Hundertwasser ("hundred waters" in German) should know. He was originally christened more prosaically Friedrich Stowasser ("dammed-up water"). If nothing else, he has learned how to let loose.

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