Arnulf Rainer, a revolutionary figure in postwar Austrian art

By Matthew Holman

Arnulf Rainer, a leading figure of the Austrian avant-garde whose gestural paintings confronted the atrocities of the Holocaust and Hiroshima and whose unflinching approach to experimental self-portraiture made him instantly recognisable, has died aged 96; his death on 18 December was confirmed by his gallery Thaddaeus Ropac who described him as one of the most influential artists of the post-war period.

Born in 1929 in Baden, Austria, Rainer came of age in the aftermath of World War II as a restless enfant terrible who distanced himself from academic traditions, finding early kinship with Surrealism and Art Informel. Largely self-taught, Rainer gravitated to Vienna in the late 1940s, a city where daily life unfolded amid rubble, scarcity, and the lingering trauma of war.

In this environment, Rainer’s practice thrived as he became a crucial figure in the reawakening of Austrian contemporary art. He was one of the founding members of Galerie nächst St Stephan, one of the very few galleries in postwar Vienna which offered a vital meeting point for artists seeking alternatives to a conservative art world playing safe and desperately seeking commercial viability.

Galerie nächst St Stephan would go on to shape generations of Austrian art, serving as the launchpad for many of the country’s most significant figures, including Maria Lassnig. Rainer’s presence there was formative: his radical approach to painting, rejection of polished surfaces, and insistence on psychological intensity helped define the gallery’s ethos. In Vienna, Rainer forged a community that was small but intellectually ferocious, united by the belief that art must square up to the material circumstances of historical traumas rather than merely apologise for them.