When the Russian artist Evgenia Isaeva recently presented herself and her opinion on Putin's war to the world public in her protest action "My heart bleeds" in the form of a painterly blood-smeared white dress, Hermann Nitsch, born in Vienna in 1938, was able to see this as a late legacy of his works.

Since the times of Viennese Actionism in the 1960s, Nitsch's theatrical spilling of blood-red paint or the same as the original substance onto mostly white canvases has been his trademark, baptized by the artist "Schüttaktionen".

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

His international breakthrough was probably the invitation to the London "Destruction in Art" symposium in 1966 - or rather the media-effective termination of that action by the police, which was followed by exhibitions and performances from all over the world.

But while his fellow Viennese activists actually drew their own blood out of themselves in existentially self-tormenting car perforations, Nitsch very soon transformed the process into painting.

The stylistic difference to Jackson Pollock's relief hieroglyphs in his expressive “Drippings”, which stand out clearly above the canvas surface, lay on the one hand in the bucket-by-pan of paint pouring out.

Purification through art as an orgy

"Cleansing with blood" sounds absurd, but it is an integral part of the ancient belief that the same can only be solved and erased with the same.

In the same way that wine turns into blood in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, Nitsch's red color coagulated into artist's lifeblood - and this should wash away all banalities.

It is not without reason that chalices can often be seen in the foreground in recordings of the actions and Nitsch acted like a biblical priest with a prophet's beard.

Nitsch's justification for doing this in the "deep acceptance of our tragic reality" could also come from Nietzsche.

And because there is a lot of Dionysian elements in the Eucharist, this also found its way into the Orgy-Mysteries-Theater:

To a cacophonous roar – Bacchus-Dionysos means nothing other than “screamer” – naked bodies knotted up, symbolically pinned to crosses and doused with warm animal blood and steaming entrails.

At times, several hundred performers and deafening choirs whipped each other up while sipping wine.

Rumors of sexual assaults within the performances, which were at least honestly declared as "orgies", stuck to Nitsch like the smell of blood on Lady Macbeth's hand.

The fact that the stage design of the “Valkyrie” for the Bayreuth Festival was created in real time from bulk images in 2021 was the highlight of the neo-mythological total works of art he consistently developed in Wagner’s successor.

The extent to which the performance pieces he developed, which attracted the public, had become an unquestioned part of anti-war and environmental campaigns over the years was shown when Nitsch, together with Greenpeace, carried out a dumping operation in front of the French embassy on Vienna's Schwarzenbergplatz in November 1995: in protest against French nuclear tests clad in black (as almost always) he spattered a canvas with deep red paint with a wide jet.

The iconographic blemish of this action remained that death by radioactive radiation tends not to shed blood, so the symbolic spilling of blood evaporated into pure theatricality.

On Easter Monday, the painter-priest and Frankfurt Städel professor Hermann Nitsch died at the age of 83 in the Mistelbach hospital north of Vienna.