Look at his inexplicably damaged children, often painted in a midnight monochrome, and you can't help but try to fill in the story, and take a degree of responsibility.
Helnwein's work is what the art world likes to call "difficult, "often as an excuse to look the other way. ...

In the film "Ninth November Night," painter Gottfried Helnwein describes his first encounter with Jewish people during his childhood in Austria after the war, a bleak and dark period, one, he says, with no singing, no laughter. He was nine years old when he saw the two people walking down the street, very close together, walking quickly, looking down the whole time.
Helnwein became intrigued and wanted to know who they were. He asked everyone, all the adults, "Who are they?" But no one wanted to answer. Finally, someone said the word, one that he remembers the person had great difficulty saying - "Jews." ...

The film tells the story of famed Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, obsessed with a mission to use his art to preserve the memory of Holocaust persecutions. ...

...these photo-paintings appear even more real than a photograph: they are hyper-real, super-saturated depictions of the world that surrounds us, as we would like to see it. Helnwein’s landscapes offer us the world as we see it in our mind’s eye, our memories.
What is certain is that with these works Helnwein has raised the bar for artists to come with art that is groundbreaking in terms of scale, skill and vision. Painted mountains, fields and sky can never be the same again. ... ...

Editor -- I am writing to suggest that the large image accompanying the review of the Gottfried Helnwein show at the Legion of Honor ("The art of Gottfried Helnwein demands a response," Monday) was inappropriate to place on the first page of the Datebook section, especially above the fold and in such a large format. It is certainly right for art to be dark and disturbing, and certainly right for people to have relatively easy access to art of all kinds -- hey, I'm an ACLU member and an avid fan of some pretty disturbing artists -- but you have to remember that The Chronicle is a family newspaper and that the Datebook section is often the one that children turn to first when they pick up the paper to search for the comics. Anyone with younger children can easily imagine the really horrifying effect this particular image would have. Couldn't you have found an image that would have suggested the nature of Helnwein's art without being such so frightening to children? Barring that, you should have printed it inside the fold and smaller.
Thanks for thinking about the kids next time.
Leif Brown
Berkeley ...

Visitors to Gottfried Helnwein's show of panoramic landscapes at the Crawford Municipial Gallery in Cork are having trouble deceiding either they are looking at paintings or photographs. Some are up to seven metres in length, by two metres wide:
a breathtaking, epic scale. They are extraordinarily beautiful, by any standards, and, yes, they are paintings.
The finish may be photorealist, but these are not direct transcriptions of what the camera lens sees; they are edited and informed by the artist's eye.
Take a close look at Irish Landscape III (Nire Valley) or Irish Landscape IV (County Waterford). Nor do they represent what the naked eye can see. American Landscape (Death Valley) is so wide that it has an almost vertiginous effect.
Dawn Williams who curated this show has done a superb job. ...

Beyond his treatment of common children's motifs - dolls, toys and ambivalent nymphets- Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's vision is shrouded in an aura of enigmatic darkness. With his giant color portraits of stillborn babies; paintings that juxtapose Nazi-era photographs with his own images; and pictures of deformed, abjectly countenanced children swathed in bandages, Helnwein is preoccupied with the indelible suffering that mirrors the more delicate aspects of youth. His work is hauntingly gorgeous and suffused with pathos, precisely because viewers are immediately aware of the larger threat that looms within the pieces: the rupture of innocence. ...

...

Helnwein's preoccupation with the dark side of modern history, including its abuse of images, has never left him. He did a whole series of paintings (the Legion show includes a couple) so dark as to appear imageless. But he intended them not as mirrors of dark times but as counterthrusts to the aggressive reach of so much contemporary culture.
Despite the grotesquerie it contains, the Legion show also has elements of pathos.

Helnwein nodded yes when asked whether he has made a theme of innocence. "It's a dangerous word, it's so abused and misused, but yes that's probably the basic essence of what I'm interested in."
"As soon as somebody's grown up they have so many issues," he said. "When you look at a person -- what social level, what country they're from, what fashion they affect -- all this stuff comes in, but I'm interested in the stage of a human being where it's not so important whether it's a male or female, before we can tell any social background or anything, it's just ... abstract, almost."
...Probably few visitors will appreciate the detachment in Helnwein's work. They will more likely respond to his concern with the power of images. We willingly subject ourselves to their power every day without really understanding it. If nothing else, his pictures, no matter how confrontational, stand still and permit us, even defy us, to understand how they work upon us. ...

His show "The Child," at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, comes with the equivalent of a PG-13 rating, for pieces that feature children and themes of emotional and physical pain. He finds the warning ironic, given that the gallery next door is full of Renaissance paintings depicting religious beheadings and stabbings, but has no warnings about violent content.
He knows that his paintings are disturbing ("I'm very bad for people who want decoration," he laughs)
He theorizes that entertainment today is passive, but his art causes people to think and "co-create" to fill in the blanks.

"Any civil society needs provocation and I think the artist, the role of the artist, is also to provoke and challenge people, because every society usually wants to hold on to the status quo,'' he said. "True artists challenge reality. You don't accept it. We want the world different."
...

A SPECTACULAR Exhibition which includes Irish Landscapes by an internationally renowned Austrian Artist is causing a stir at the Crawford Municipial Art Gallery in Cork. ...

An artist with conscience, a fearless man with a penchant for profoundly bizarre and complex, meaningful images, Gottfried Helnwein is making a grand re-entry to San Francisco. His work was exhibited here four years ago when his freaky mixed-media portrait of Mickey Mouse - "Mouse I" - was part of the SF Museum of Modern Art's "The Darker Side of Playland - Childhood Imagery."
The paintings are extraordinary, grotesque, powerful, "difficult" and challenging, according to Parker and the curator of the Legion exhibit, Robert Flynn Johnson.
They are all that, and more. A simple description of the works, without context, would only indicate a freak show: a photo-like painting of Hitler with two very Aryan-looking children, an actual bar of soap encased under them; a group of uniformed Nazis gazing adoringly on a contemporary Mother and Child (Helnwein explaining that the people in the photograph that was the basis for the painting were actually surrounding Hitler); images of normal children mixed with misshapen, ill, tortured youngsters. "Why would people cause so much pain to others?" Helnwein asks, and he shows the pain, unflinchingly, but not to titillate the demented or to horrify the ignorant.
"The Child" - located in a part of the Legion next to a permanent exhibit of Renaissance Mother and Child images by Pontormo, Tintoretto, Raphael, and others - has far more to offer than politics, morality, controversy and horror. Although there is no doubt that primarily Helnwein is "the artist as provocateur," he is also an artist in the sense of creating unique and lasting images. ...

A new exhibit called "The Child," through Nov. 28 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, presents images of distressed, wounded or threatened children, a topic that has fascinated Helnwein for years.
Many of the children depicted in the show have deformities, bandages, scars or wounds; some appear threatened by menacing adults or by mayhem. Their suffering, indeed wrenching to witness, inevitably becomes a statement about the human condition.
A 55-year-old father of four, Helnwein sees himself as an artist with a message. "A big part of contemporary art is not connected to anything," he said. "It's important for certain artists to respond to what's going on in present time."
Curator Robert Flynn Johnson believes it is appropriate to display art with a moral message. "Museums shouldn't be like Rip Van Winkle, in a state of catatonic sleep," he says. "They should take on issues. Otherwise they will be seen just as a low-grade entertainment vehicle. We're not out to shock -- we're out to make people think."
Johnson places Helnwein in the tradition of such contemporary activist artists as filmmakers Michael Moore ("Fahrenheit 9/11") and Errol Morris ("The Fog of War"), painter Gerhard Richter and painter Sue Coe, whose "deadmeat prints" include images of animal slaughter.
Museum officials have posted notices in the museum lobby and outside the gallery to warn people that viewer discretion is advised.

Officials at the Legion hope the exhibit will reach an audience that more typically comes to blockbuster shows on classical Egypt or the Old Masters. "If I do a show like this one that upsets the docents,"Johnson says, "I know that I've got a good show." ...

Adding To The Discussion Gottfried Helnwein is an artist whose work - "giant color portraits of stillborn babies, paintings that merge Nazi-archive photographs with pictures Helnwein has taken, enigmatic portrayals of apparently wounded or menaced children" - tends to provoke strong reactions, and in recent years, several individuals have expressed their displeasure with some of his images by defacing them. Helnwein confesses to being initially startled by the vandalism, but these days, he has decided that the viewer has as much to contribute to the larger discussion as the artist, and if people are moved to destroy what he has created, he can at least salute their passion. ...

...the work is extremely ambitious, both in terms of scale and rendering - some paintings are seven metres long and all are so realistic that they are nearly indistinguishable from photographs.
Consequently they cannot fail but to strike a chord, as you marvel at the skill involved in creating such vivid and realistic landscape views. So much so that Fáilte Ireland is surely gaining free advertising, as many will be inspired to venture out and experience these places first hand.
Helnwein re-creates theses vistas using a composite of photographic sources which cram multiple focal points into a single view. The surfaces are absolutely flawless with practically no evidence of the artist's brushwork. Studying the surface is absorbing, as the viewer is immersed in the detail as much as seductive wider views of the vast, undulating topography. ...

Almost 'autobiographical landscapes', the paintings in this exhibition by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein broadly outline the migrations he, and his family, have made from his native Vienna, through Germany, to America and Ireland, his family home since 1997. Yet these landscapes also mark a return to his earliest artistic inspiration. Helnwein's meticulous Irish landscapes are unashamedly aesthetic and the typically epic, but not inhuman scale, imitates the subject matter with each painting seeming to breathe a sense of a year well advanced, after the effusive growth and floral displays of May. Sunset beckons here and with it, Romanticism. ...

Helnwein's first-ever solo American museum exhibition features paintings, drawings, watercolors and photographs by the Austrian artist famous for his disturbing yet compelling portraits of injured children, whose images he uses to represent innocence lost. ...

From 3 July to 4 September Gottfried Helnwein exhibits some of his large photo-realist landscapes. These really are BIG paintings, with some of the canvases reaching seven metres in length.
So what, you may yawn, but the work has to be seen to be believed.
Helnwein specialises in the classic, dramatic sublime and, not surprisingly, Caspar David Friedrich is cited as an influence. ...

Some of the most powerful images that deal with Nazism and Holocaust themes are by Anselm Kiefer and Helnwein, although, Kiefer’s work differs considerably from Helnwein’s in his concern with the effect of German aggression on the national psyche and the complexities of German cultural heritage. Kiefer is known for evocative and soulful images of barren German landscapes.
But Kiefer and Helnwein’s work are both informed by the personal experience of growing up in a post-war German speaking countries...
William Burroughs said that the American revolution begins in books and music, and political operatives implement the changes after the fact. To this maybe we can add art. And Helnwein's art might have the capacity to instigate change by piercing the veil of political correctness to recapture the primitive gesture inherent in art.

...

"... I believe the cure for any depression is expression in your heart, and Gottfried Helnwein was one of the most supportive people towards me. He was the one who gave me that advice, and he was correct with it.
'Personal Jesus' says everything that I would say if I were to write a song right now. I was listening to it on a CD I just bought because I wanted to really take a step away from the world. I wasn't sure if I was going to put out a 'best of' or if I was going to do anything in general with music, because there's a frustration level that the more commercial you are, the more marginal you are - also, the lack of art that exists in entertainment, and the lack of interest. People are much more content with watching The Real World and reality television, than living their own lives, or watching something that comes from imagination.
You know what it is? It's not even Bush's fault. It's America making itself the Third Reich.
Imagination is a necessity, and I don't think it's sort of bad. I can dream up some image like I did with Helnwein, and they're "bad," they're forbidden, but I can take an image that's far worse, that's on CNN and it's reality. So we can't get censored. It's the real world.
But that's a bad message to send to kids growing up, I think.
('The Golden Age of Grotesque':)
...I was not allowed to put the paintings on the cover of the record! Our anticipation was not to create album artwork. We wanted to collaborate and create something together, and we did not consider the Golden Age of Grotesque to be limited to an album.
...All I can say about it is I'm glad that it makes it into the collection of images that represent me as best as it could. I think that it just scratches the surface of what Gottfried and I could do together"
Marilyn Manson
Los Angeles, July 2004 ...