Arnulf Rainer for the Opera Ball

The idea of the 68th Vienna Opera Ball to focus on solidarity for the fourth time in a row in 2026 was also followed by the important Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer. During his lifetime, he donated a work to the Vienna State Opera for the poster motif of the Opera Ball, which will subsequently be auctioned off at Dorotheum. The net proceeds of this auction, like all other donations collected in connection with the ball, will go to the charity Österreich hilft Österreich.

The title of the picture already hints at the central messages of the celebration: Velvet and silk crackle and nestle flatteringly in our thoughts of the forthcoming celebration; they not only appeal to our gaze, but the soft, fine fabrics also entice our sense of touch. In his painting, Arnulf Rainer uses curved lines to accentuate a sweep of supple physicality, with delicate, translucent bands of color wafting across the painted surface like silken veils. A feast of concealment and display leads to the serene overall tone of the painting.

Are we deceiving ourselves? Isn't Arnulf Rainer the great overpainter, under whose painting attacks the found pictorial ideas have to sink again and disappear to give way to another layer in the paint skin? We remember these paintings with their black, matt-glossy surfaces, whose melancholy mood conjures up dark forebodings.

They were created from the 1950s onwards in an attempt to come to terms with what had happened - the Holocaust and Hiroshima, war and destruction and the fears of the present. Back then, in 1951, Rainer published a portfolio of photographs entitled Perspectives on Destruction. It contained a list of deficits - silence, loss, absence, death, the other, nothingness. These are the words of the 22-year-old artist, who seems to be trapped by his fears and is beginning to settle into an existentialist world.

We are better advised here to see the other side as well: Rainer also paints his color coverings in red, green and even white. Even then, he never loses sight of color and demonstrates this in the proportions, some of which are pasted from colored paper.

In the magnificent storyThe Unknown Masterpiece(Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, 1831), Honoré Balzac describes the disappearance of an image in painting. The picture burns up, as it were, in the onslaught of painting impetus in glowing colors. Step by step, what is recognizable as an image sinks into the flurry of colours. Rainer, on the other hand, pursues a completely different approach in his struggle with and against emptiness - against the void, the nothingness, the white surface.

A further turning point in the spiral that brought Arnulf Rainer's work to the top was his engagement with photography from the end of the 1960s. His preoccupation with his own physiognomy emerged through the vending machine photos taken at night at Vienna's Westbahnhof. In the reworking of the enlarged motifs, a completely new approach to the image emerged. This becomes the place and starting point of a new painting of emotional tension and vehement painting gestures. Once, when I was painting over the cheeks of a large photograph, I broke my brush in a painting frenzy. In my haste, I tried to do it with my hands, slapping and hitting the cheek and was fascinated by the slap in the face, by the traces of my hand strokes. (A.R. 1974)

First in the Face Farces and later in the hand paintings, Rainer discovered more and more possibilities of color: from the direct expression of color through the fingers and the hand on the painting surface. The coverings of color are no longer absolute, and thus paintings with a translucent, transparent application of color follow. In the veil pictures, which include the present painting Black Velvet, Red Silk (2001), the color tones are so densely layered in the sequence and thinly applied that they appear translucent like real veils of gauze. Here, the lines of the drawing interweave with the luminosity of color to create a happy climax in the painter's late work. Happy in the sense that he was able to unfold from the heavy weight of his early work to bright pictures in pink-red and sky-blue.

A text by Helmut Friedel

The Dorotheum online auction started on January 16 at 10.00 am and will run until February 19, 2026, 4.00 pm. The work can be viewed at Dorotheum.

Bids can be placed on the Dorotheum website. The starting price is €40,000.