The artist Gottfried Helnwein (born 1948) has been known for decades as a master of provocation and technique in the visual and performing arts. While his early works were drawn from the horrors witnessed by his own generation, as well as his youth in post-World War II Austria, Helnwein's more recent paintings present more hallucinatory images of reverie, combining powerful gestures of light and shadow with depictions of the aftermath of violence, brutality and suffering. In the works gathered in this monograph, Helnwein particularly dwells on children as victims of unexplained violence (as the image used on the book's front cover conveys). "I Was a Child" was published for the first major exhibition of Helnwein's work in New York.