I should have visited Arnulf again. Not at some point, not after the holidays, not just when you have enough space to tell the story you have in your head. I should have met him for one last big conversation that I had planned for TIME. It didn’t happen anymore. Arnulf Rainermy father’s younger brother, died on December 18, 2025, ten days after his 96th birthday. So I don’t have an interview left, just the memory. It is not made up of facts, but of images, smells, tones of voice – and places. Maybe that suits my uncle better anyway, whose work always thrives on the fact that something is still working beneath the visible layer, that what is covered does not disappear but speaks back.
Vienna
My first Arnulf Rainer is not a portrait, but a crowd. Gallery next to St. Stephan in Vienna in the 1960s: high rooms, white walls, voices, footsteps, the rustling of coats. I was a child holding my parents’ hands, and what I remember most is proportions. How tall the adults were, how high the frames hung, how much everything pushed upwards. My father Helmut, a chemist and industrial manager, moved in this world with a mixture of pride and skepticism. I trudged through the coats, the abstract pictures seemed like doodles to me, at times I thought I recognized animals in them and gave the works titles. It was a childlike game with a strange seriousness. I said what I felt before I could see it. Arnulf didn’t react condescendingly, but rather with interest. He wanted to know what this child thought about his art. This interest impressed itself on me: that there was someone who not only took pictures, but could also listen.
I also remember an attic apartment on Mariahilfer Strasse, the studio, and the cold. My parents brought bread. Arnulf was lying in bed with the blanket up to his nose. Newspapers covered the walls – not as decoration, but as a protective layer against the world. For us, coming from the narrow confines of the Salzkammergut, it was still the big city. And somewhere on the edge of this family world was the knowledge of Arnulf’s twin brother Reinhard, who became a lawyer and later was at home in the UN world of the nuclear agency. In this city sat a man who, even back then, seemed as if he had his own temperature of work and silence, of withdrawal and relation to the world at the same time.
Decades later I stood there again. Arnulf had long been a global name. I bought his pictures, not out of a collecting instinct, but out of the need to have something that wasn’t just a memory. You can’t hang family on the wall, but you can let them look at you – often enough he painted over himself, my children, and me too.
Carinthia
There was once a small family reunion at Längensee, where my grandfather came from: Arnulf, his twin brother Reinhard, my father Helmut. A long wooden table in a farm. I was already an adult, but at that moment I felt like a teenager again, listening to the brothers. They talked about growing up and family. I was impressed by how well they bonded with each other, even though they almost never saw each other. That’s when I realized what family means. I have rarely experienced so much quiet agreement in this distant family as there. Arnulf said little, as always. But there was warmth between the short sentences. He felt comfortable – strange because he hadn’t grown up there, and yet consistent, as if his origins had a second address. This table revealed a quality that could easily be overlooked because his work appears so radical: a conservative loyalty, not to the pose, but to the form. Family as a form, work as a form. And at the same time the emancipation from that German national Carinthian background, which likes to pathetically disguise itself as tradition. This emancipation was not a speech, but counterwork.
He didn’t know authoritarianism from books, but from his own childhood. He attended Napola, the Nazi national political educational institution in Traiskirchen, and left when he was forced to draw “from nature.” This little scene contains the basic principle of his life: not to obey what he finds. The fact that his work was a rebellion against authoritarianism in post-war society sounds like a feature article – until you understand how concrete that is: formal, physical, insistent. Painting over does not mean destroying. To paint over means to transform.
new York
It was 1989 and I was already a journalist at the Workers’ newspaperand a solo exhibition took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Arnulf’s 60th birthday. The little man from the small country in perhaps the most beautiful museum in the world: the museum snail as a stage, Austrian politics on display, the grand gestures of representation. Our family also flew in. And in the middle of it all I saw him, always remaining a loner, as if recognition were something that was accepted but not lived in. He was conservative again in his resistance to fashion: patinated jackets, old ties. No style, more of a quiet insistence: I’m here for the work, not the glitz. His distance was never cold, but rather a condition of freedom. The greater the international presence, the more decisive the retreat into the interior – as if global reputation needed a counterspace. “I can only revise something that I have a connection to, that I value,” he once said.
Innviertel
About a month ago I was with him in his converted farm in the Innviertel. Outside there is a stupa, a small Buddhist monument – a quiet, unexpected shape in the Austrian winter. Inside: newspapers, the little dog, the grandchild, the daughter, the son-in-law, his wife. Arnulf was physically weak but mentally alert. He ate and drank little, slept a lot, but seemed ready to go: without sadness, without complaints.
I sat there and thought about the conversation I still wanted to have, about questions that were supposed to bring order. It has been three decades since I asked him if he was a believer. His answer was short as always: “Of course!” he said and looked at me incredulously. I would have liked to talk about this again.
But that afternoon I realized how inappropriate it is to bring a person out into public again, especially when they are already detached. And especially when he has always defended himself against this false approach with his work. In his notes from 1951 he wrote: “I am not interested in simple ‘truth’ in art. I first want to create distance, a respectful distance for myself. Through these ugly self-portrayals no one gets too close to me.”
And yet there were cracks in the severity of the meeting through which warmth filtered through. A look that hit without hurting. He could treat language like paint: twisting, layering, shifting until it was no longer smooth. Maybe that was the connection between him, the artist, and me, the journalist: the distrust of sentences that are too easy – and the belief that truth only emerges when you work on what you find, not when you just describe it.
Our last big conversation never took place. His art didn’t have to be soothing to be valid; she was allowed to be rough, resistant, rude as long as she kept something moving. What remains is an uncle who you wanted to visit again too late, but who is not a missed story, but a mission: not to smooth over what you found, but to transform it.
