(Vienna 1928–2000 Pacific Ocean, on board the Queen Elizabeth II)
“Memento of a Trip”, signed, dated Hundertwasser 1957, St Tropez, on the reverse in the artist’s handwriting: “La Serre Erinnerung an eine Reise 1957 St Tropez 326” (catalogue raisonné no.), watercolour on white primed wrapping paper, 50.5 x 49.3 cm, framed, (K)

Andrea Christa Fürst, Hundertwasser 1928–2000, catalogue raisonné vol. II, Taschen 2002, p. 344/326 with ill.

Provenance:
Viennese Collection

Exhibited:
Hundertwasser – Meine Augen sind müde, Galerie St Stephan, Vienna 1957 Hundertwasser, Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, 1965

Listed in the exhibition catalogues:
Hundertwasser, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover 1964, p. 160
Hundertwasser, Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna 1965, cat. no. 65

Illustrated in:
Wieland Schmied, Hundertwasser, published by Galerie Welz, Salzburg 1974, colour plate 59, page 315

Hundertwasser painted his first spiral picture on the roof of a hotel in Stuttgart in June 1953. The watercolour had the title “The Mountain and the Sun”... The spiral had already emphatically announced itself in certain pictorial motifs in the manner of painting leading up to a concentric circle on the cheeks of the Hundertwasser heads, in the bulls’-eyes of the steamboats, in the borders of the buses, trucks and trams, and finally in the ball shape of the trees. Now the spiral makes itself independent. It is relieved of the duty to describe or to suggest concrete objects. It has itself become an object, a theme, a motif. Out of it one can even discern other things if it reminds the viewer of rivers, paths, mountains, the sun, or whatever, but it is first and foremost the elemental and exists in its own right.
From the aforementioned catalogue raisonné.