Friedensreich Hundertwasser Posters, Calendars & Books
for art, art history and social studies classrooms, home schoolers, and offices.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser, née Friedrich Stowasser
b. 12-15-1928; Vienna, Austria
d. 2-19-2000; buried New Zealand

Friedensreich Hundertwasser was an artist, painter, sculptor, performer, and architect who both created and expressed himself with boldly colored pictorial organic forms and spirals. He is known for his unconventional architectural facades, buildings with wavy floors, clothing, postage stamp, flag and poster design.

We Live in Paradise, c.1999, Art Print

The Friedensreich Hundertwasser name loosely translates as “Peace-Realm Hundred-Water”, an expression of his environmental and life philosophy (Friedrich means peace, reich=realm, hundert is hundred and wasser is water). He saw humanity as being a “guest of nature who needs to behave,” and every person being able to “...lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach....take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach...visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.”

Hundertwasser attended a Montessori school, collected pebbles, and pressed flowers as a child. All of his mother's relatives died in the Holocaust. Hundertwasser chose New Zealand as his home and was buried there after his death at sea.

Hundertwasser quotes ~
• “You are a guest of nature. Behave.”
• “The further we move away from nature, the less free we become.”
• “There is no energy crisis. There is only an immeasurable waste of energy.”
• “In order to be happy, man does not need mechanical energy, but internal creative energy.”
• “We produce in a panic, consume like crazy, waste blindly, and man is degraded to a consumption machine. Nuclear energy is probably meant to reinforce this most dangerous of all enslavements.”
• “Whoever propagates nuclear energy is either extremely short-sighted, tendentiously informed, or consciously criminal. It is the government’s responsibility to inform the population about the dangers of nuclear energy.”
• “Nuclear energy is not only an ecological, but also a gigantic economic catastrophe.”
• “Nuclear energy, too, this final aberration in the history of mankind, was only possible because the focus is only on the seemingly rational. Moral-aesthetic values are missing, and the link between man and creation, which is represented by art. Without art, without the creative, there is nothing.”
• “A tree is cut down in five minutes, but it takes fifty years to grow the tree. That is approximately the relation between technocratic destruction and ecological rebuilding.”
• “Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.”
• “Visual pollution is more poisonous than any other pollution because it kills the soul.”