VIENNA.- The first comprehensive show in Austria on the life and work of Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse is on view through 3 June 2007 at the Leopold Museum. In addition to Hesse�s relatively unknown watercolours, the internationally renowned Hesse expert and editor of the complete edition Volker Michels and curator Dr. Bettina Leder-Hindemith have assembled a large selection of original letters, photos, poems and manuscripts for this exhibition at the Leopold Museum. Thus the show provides insight into the wide-ranging creativity of this versatile artist.

Hermann Hesse: Loved, Successful, Forgotten
Today Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) continues to be read and loved primarily by young people. Thus, with sales averaging more than 30,000 books per month, he is one of the key sustainers of the German publishing house Suhrkamp. Since the rediscovery of the author of �Steppenwolf� by the American hippie movement in the 1960s, Hesse has remained the most widely read German-language author world-wide. His books have been translated into 60 languages and have sold more than 100 million copies. Nonetheless, scholarly exploration of the literature Nobel Prize winner�s work has been rather scanty: while exhibitions and documentaries on authors like Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann have been produced in recent years, a presentation of the life and work of Hermann Hesse has never been undertaken in Austria. From 23 February through 3 June 2007 the Leopold Museum will fill this gap with the largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to the most influential German-language author of the twentieth century.

Poet and Painter
Hermann Hesse referred to his life as a �picture book� that he leafed through with great care. For him the separation of image and word required conscious effort, and thus the Leopold Museum is presenting both aspects of the artist�s life in detail. �Not that I consider myself a painter, but painting is wonderful. Afterwards one doesn�t have black fingers, as with writing, rather red and blue,� remarked Hesse coquettishly. It was during the First World War, when he was suffering from a serious depression, that Hesse first turned to painting as a form of therapy on his doctor�s advice. The allure of painting would never release its grasp on him, and it brought more vivid colour into his writing as well. In the exhibition, 100 watercolours are brought together with first editions of his books, manuscripts, letters and other items, including even his straw hat, which demonstrate the fascination exuded by the Nobel Prize winner�s work. His philosophy of life � to seek the solution for problems within oneself and thus to defend one�s individual autonomy against every form of outside control � retains all of the relevance it had during his lifetime.

From a Pietist Family via India to Tessin
The show devotes great attention to Hermann Hesse�s biography, which provides an important key to understanding of the thinker�s philosophical development. Thirty-eight informational plaques guide visitors through the author�s life, from his upbringing in a strict Pietist home, where he also encountered the foreign culture of India early on (his parents were missionaries abroad), to the traumatising severity of the era�s school system, which the Hesse later dealt with in the novel �Under the Wheel�. After initial successes with the novel �Peter Camenzind� (1904), Hesse very early in his career renounced the vain life of the �major author�, opting instead for a hermit�s existence far from the large metropolises. The philosophy of self-determination pervades his entire oeuvre. His books repeatedly assert that the answers to the questions posed by the world are to be found within oneself. Highlights of his literary production include �Siddhartha� (1922), in which Hesse created a monument to his lifelong study of Eastern philosophy, and �Steppenwolf�, through which the 50-year-old author overcame a deep depression and achieved a new reconciliation with the finiteness of the individual and the world. His last novel �The Glass Bead Game� (also known under the title �Magister Ludi�), published in 1943 in Zurich, gave voice to the wisdom of his later years and can even be interpreted as anticipating the networked virtual world of cyberspace.

All of Hesse�s important works are exhibited in valuable first editions as well as in hand-written drafts and various manuscript versions. Hesse was polite in his acceptance of the 1946 Nobel Prize, but he considered the award ceremony absurd and nothing more than a fashionable appearance. Thus he merely sent a few friendly lines for the festive banquet in Stockholm and did not undertake the journey. When Hesse died in 1962 in Montagnola, he had already for the most part faded from public attention. His widow, Ninon, who had grown up in the Austrian monarchy and studied art history in Vienna, began working through his papers and editing his unpublished works.

The reawakening of interest in Hermann Hesse began in the late 1960s. It was most of all in the USA and in Japan that he attained cult status. The hundreds of books brought together in a comfortable reading corner in the exhibition�s last gallery provide an intimation of the countless editions and translations that are available.

The Play of Colour
Hermann Hesse, after suffering a nervous breakdown in the midst of the First World War, began painting at his doctor�s advice. He was aged forty and had fallen into a deep personal crisis. After his first clumsy attempts at drawing images from his dreams for psychotherapy, Hesse began illustrating handwritten copies of his own poems and selling these bibliophile treasures to aficionados. This provided a means of earning money for his work assisting prisoners of war. After the war and during the years of runaway inflation he relied on these artistic creations for his subsistence. �Now, where the monetary situation has practically made me into a pauper, I have begun living from painting,� he wrote in a 1920 letter.

And yet painting was much more than a breadwinner or a pleasant pastime for Hermann Hesse. It became an existential necessity and a means of getting away from the literary world. When the author settled in Tessin after the separation from his first wife, his palette, which until that time had been restrained, began to explode with colour. During the first summer in Tessin, Hesse erected a monument to himself as a painter with the autobiographically inclined novella �Klingsor�s Last Summer�. �The small palette filled with pure, unmixed colours, filled with the brightest luminescence,� says the painter in Hesse�s book, �it was my solace, my arsenal, my prayer book and my canon, with which I took aim against death. With it I have made magic a thousand times and won the battle with the stupidity of reality.�

In approximately 100 watercolours and in numerous illustrated manuscripts, letters and poems, the exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of this unknown side of the artist Hermann Hesse.

Hermann Hesse on his painting:

�My watercolours are a sort of poetry or dreaming; they carry only a distant memory of reality, transforming it according to personal feelings and needs...� (from a letter written by Hesse to Helene Welti, 1919)

�This dreadful winter, which does not even deserve to be referred to as such, is getting on my nerves. We had snow for a short time � I enjoyed that very much and was even out with the sled for half a day. Since then it has thawed and rained. It is warm and wet, foehn wind always blowing, a most characterless weather. Confound these times, when the summers are cool and the winters warm: it is repugnant to my very soul, which loves extreme heat or cold, vivid colours and clear light.� (HH in a letter to Stefan Zweig from 9 February 1904))