dark inspiration

He winds through the narrow hallway that runs parallel to a series of smaller rooms -- hidden nooks, a loft where his wife, Renate, makes a stream of business calls. On the south-facing wall of his work space hang several unfinished canvases from a current series titled "Disasters of War." "It is in memory of Francisco Goya because 200 years ago, when he witnessed the war and cruelties in Spain, he made this series. I felt it was time to do it again. Completely different because with me the central theme is always the child. I want to see what's going on through the child's eyes." They are, he says, metaphors, "for the potential of innocence."

Shaped by World War II

On one end of the brick-walled room, a long rolling table holds scores of books, there to flip through for quick reference, inspiration: volumes on Vermeer and Bosch, "Movies of the Thirties," "R. Crumb Handbook," "Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots." Another table is a jumble of paint tubes and brushes. Within a long arm's reach of his work in progress are a set of steel baker's racks holding a stereo and piles of CDs -- Beethoven, Schubert, Bach. "I listen to classical music and the blues. My daughter Mercedes . . . knows anybody who ever was singing the blues." The rest of the shelves are taken up with audio books -- "Buddenbrooks," "Huck Finn," James Ellroy's "Suicide Hill." "There are all these things that I want to read, but I don't have the time. So this is fantastic," he explains, "because when you paint so realistic . . . you need to sometimes paint hour after hour, and so I found out that I can listen so intensely."

His work routine extends his obsessive study of the world. "The task for me, for my life, since I was a kid, [is] I want to find out what is really going on," says Helnwein. "I was born in Vienna after the Second World War. Vienna was a very depressed place. And it was dark. I remembered never seeing anyone smile a lot. I never heard a song. People were broken. The Second World War was lost -- the Nazi time was over -- we were wrong again. Overnight, everybody was for democracy. So you can guess what that means."

The turnabout made him suspicious. It also filled him with questions that made people squirm. "Art, for myself, is a way to carry on this research in an aesthetic means. You always have to question: Why is that guy saying that now?"