The painter who painted over himself Remembering Arnulf Rainer

[Translated from German] 

By Hans Joachim-Muller

The young painter began his journey in black and white. He filled page after page with swirling, chaotic figures, his graphite pencil moving so vigorously up and down that the objects appear buried in coal dust. That was a long time ago: the early 1950s. "Back then, I had read the writings of André Breton," the elderly Arnulf Rainer recalled in conversation, "but I was completely unaware, thinking Surrealism was something very much a contemporary phenomenon. I truly didn't know it was already thirty years in the past." He visited the master in Paris, but learned only "pure Trotskyist doctrine" from him. Surrealism was a disappointment. But where could one find a foothold if one didn't want to side with abstraction and didn't want to commit to representational art?

It wasn't long before the headstrong young artist began his "overpaintings," which would become the very essence and hallmark of his work. Arnulf Rainer often recounted how, practically penniless and broke, he bought paintings for next to nothing at a Viennese flea market because frames and canvases were too expensive. And while it may be a bit of an artist myth, what's significant about this life detail is that it was clearly not so easy to cover up the banal underpaintings with monochrome surfaces in the style of abstract expressionism. It made a considerable difference, he explained, whether the flea market painting depicted a ship, a floral still life, or a portrait. "I couldn't just paint over it. I had to engage with what was underneath. That's how I began to react to what had been painted over, to make contact with the existing motifs."

As an overpainter, Arnulf Rainer has painted over his own pictures and those of colleagues: photographic self-portraits, nudes, art historical illustrations, pages in old scientific books, the grotesque "character heads" of the late Baroque sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, "Animalia and Botanika," van Gogh's self-portraits, photographs of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, death faces, death masks—the series are legion. What might be overpainted is often invisible, obscured by swirls of green, red, black, and white paint. His work contains both: overpainting that reveals nothing and overpainting that leaves the original or underlying layer partially visible.