The post-war years and Viennese Actionism
After the Nazi era and the war, Austria was rebuilt with its gaze turned backwards. Against that silence rose the Fantastic Realists, the abstract painters around the Galerie nächst St. Stephan and finally the Viennese Actionists, who made the body a work of art and provocation a method.
During the seven years as part of Nazi Germany Austria lost a large part of its art world through persecution, exile and murder. After the liberation in 1945 the country was divided into four occupation zones, and official culture looked back to the time before 1938, to the Baroque and to Klimt. Young artists gathered in the Art-Club from 1947 and sought contact with international modernist painting.
Two directions emerged. The Fantastic Realists, Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmden, painted dreamlike, detailed pictures in the technique of the old masters. Around the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, run by the priest Otto Mauer, abstract painters gathered instead, such as Arnulf Rainer, Josef Mikl, Wolfgang Hollegha and Markus Prachensky. Friedensreich Hundertwasser attacked the straight line and modern architecture.
In the 1960s some artists went further than anyone else in Europe. Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler staged actions with bodies, blood, paint and food, as a critique of a society they found hypocritical, Catholic and authoritarian. The Viennese Actionists were arrested and convicted several times. At the same time VALIE EXPORT used her own body to examine the way women are looked at.