The great painter Arnulf Rainer has died With his diverse and radical work, the Austrian artist made his mark on art history

[Translated from German]

By Katharina Rustler

From the very beginning, he resisted going with the flow. Throughout his life, Arnulf Rainer searched for radical and new artistic solutions – and found them in his art. His art not only rejected prevailing norms of painting, but also erased content and form, thereby creating new ones – surrendering itself fully to existentialist questions. As his family has now announced, the "overpainter," the enfant terrible and most important Austrian avant-garde artist of the post-war period, died on December 18 at the age of 96.

Rainer was born in Baden near Vienna in 1929. In 1945, at the age of 15, he fled the Russian occupation to Carinthia. There, at an exhibition of the British Council, he discovered international contemporary artists – including the works of Francis Bacon, which made a lasting impression on him. In 1948, Rainer met Maria Lassnig. Her Carinthian studio became an important meeting place, and the painter a significant companion, both artistically and personally.

After graduating from school, Rainer was accepted to both the University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but left both institutions after only a few days. He rebelled against the aesthetics of National Socialist art, oriented himself towards other artistic movements, such as the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, and created his first surrealist drawings. Together with Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehmden, Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hollegha, and Josef Mikl, he founded his own group, "Hundsgruppe" (Dog Group), in the early 1950s. Now, with Rainer's death, the last of this artistic guard has passed away.