Hauser’s artistic oeuvre is very extensive as well as diverse, and the extraordinary quality of his drawing is what makes it compelling. Motivated by Leo Navratil and the drawings of airplanes created by his fellow patient and Gugging artist Aurel Iselstöger, Hauser began drawing in the late fifties. His oeuvre is exceptional to the extent that his first drawings already indicate both the motifs and stylistic characteristics he would only modify or refine during the later periods of his work. His preferred medium for his drawings was pencil or colored pencil on paper, and they exhibit an intense and forceful lineation that often displays an enormous graphic concentration. Hauser created his first etchings in 1968, and he understood how to utilize the etching needle from the very beginning. His personal art of drawing seems to have been made for this technique: the etching needle allows for precise lines and images. Hauser used colored pencils to color in many of these sheets decades after they were printed. His art deals with a great variety of themes. Hauser’s primary motif was images of women. Most of these are nudes in which particular emphasis is placed on the figures’ secondary sex characteristics. We additionally find military aircraft, tanks, or ambulances that can surely be traced back to his experiences during the Second World War. On the other hand, there are depictions of individual motifs, such as a rectangle, sun, and moon or a heart and star. The “Hauser Star,” with its four irregular points and Prussian-blue tone surrounded by contour lines drawn in pencil, also made Hauser the leading representative of the Gugging Artists symbolically.

Johann Hauser was born in Bratislava on November 30, 1926. He never met his father and had two half sisters. In 1943, during the Second World War, he had to move to Austria with his family. Hauser attended a special-education school but did not finish. He entered the State Mental Health and Care Facility at Mauer-Öhling shortly after he turned sixteen, and he was then transferred to the “Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging” in 1949, where he remained for the rest of his life. Hauser’s artistic work played a decisive role in drawing public attention to the Gugging Artists because—particularly in the sixties—Arnulf Rainer, Peter Pongratz, Jean Dubuffet, and many other artists found his work compelling. He moved into the “House of Artists” in 1981 and lived there until his death on January 7, 1996.