Arnulf Rainer, an artist of limitless experimentation

[Translated from French]

By Philippe Dagen

Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer died in Vienna on Thursday, December 18, at the age of 96, the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery announced on December 21. Working between painting and photography, he created one of the freest and most profound bodies of work of the second half of the 20th century. 

He was born in Baden, a suburb of Vienna, on December 8, 1929. During the Second World War, he was required to attend school in Nazi Austria, but in 1944 he left the National Institute of Political Education, where he was a student, after a dispute with a drawing teacher who insisted he imitate nature. The rest of his schooling was equally turbulent. Although he graduated from an architecture school in 1949, he spent only one day at the Vienna School of Applied Arts, which he considered outdated, and three days at the Academy of Fine Arts, because his work there was deemed "degenerate ," as it would have been during the Third Reich. 

However, he knew that another art existed. He had a first glimpse of it in 1947 at exhibitions of contemporary works organized by the British Council and the French Institute in Klagenfurt, Carinthia. Driven by the need to see for himself, he went to Paris in 1951 in the company of another independent artist, the painter Maria Lassnig (1919-2014).