Oskar Kokoschka

Austrian painter

• Born: March 1, 1886
• Birthplace: Pöchlarn, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)
• Died: February 22, 1980
• Place of death: Villeneuve, Switzerland

Although he was reluctant to be identified with any art movement, Kokoschka is generally considered one of Europe’s finest expressionist painters. Excelling at psychologically oriented portraiture, he also produced striking allegorical compositions, lithographs, landscapes, posters, and half a dozen plays.

Early Life

Oskar Kokoschka (AHS-kahr koh-KOHSH-kah) was born in the Austrian village of Pöchlarn on the Danube River, thirty miles west of Vienna. The Kokoschkas moved to Vienna when Oskar was four, subsisting marginally on the feckless father’s poor wages as a clerk. From an early age, Kokoschka considered himself the virtual head of the family, generously providing for his parents, sister, and younger brother once his paintings sold. At school, bored by his courses, he read unassigned classics under his desk. In 1904, he received a scholarship to the School of Arts and Crafts, whose faculty was dominated by members of the Secession group, which sought to vitalize Vienna’s formalist art. One of his teachers, Carl Czeschka, encouraged him to plan a career as an artist, not merely as an art instructor. Although Kokoschka received no formal training in painting, he began doing oils and lithographs in 1907 that were immediately notable for their wild fantasy, violent rocking effects, undulating lines, and glowing colors.

In 1908, Kokoschka had a number of entries accepted at the annual Kunstschau, a widely reviewed, municipally sponsored exhibition. His illustrated book, Die traeumenden Knaben (the dreaming youths), published in 1917, shocked most of the conservative critics, who quickly labeled him an enfant terrible. Kokoschka’s work attracted the fascinated admiration of the architect Adolph Loos, who became his lifelong friend, patron, adviser, and agent. Loos bought at the exhibition a polychrome head in clay, the first of what were to be frequent Kokoschka self-portraits. Loos welcomed Kokoschka’s individualistic rejection of romantic ornamentalism, considering Kokoschka’s art, like his own architecture, a rebellion against sham and hypocrisy.

In 1909, Kokoschka again sent a group of works to the Kunstschau, but this time critics concentrated their attack, not on his paintings, but on his single-scene, expressionist play: Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen (murder hope of women). In it, a man, threatened by an assaultive woman’s sexual desire, renews the strength she has sapped from him by killing her. A riot erupted among the first-nighters; Kokoschka’s school immediately dismissed him.

Life’s Work

Kokoschka’s boldly provocative art and whimsical personality won for him, by his early twenties, the friendship of some of Vienna’s leading avant-garde luminaries, including not only Loos but also the poet Peter Altenberg and the scorchingly satirical journalistKarl Kraus. They formed a witty, sophisticated circle in which Kokoschka felt proud to be included. Loos commissioned him to paint portraits of Kraus and Altenberg. Impressed by his talent, Loos made this arrangement with Kokoschka: Loos would search out people prepared to sit for the gifted young artist. Should the subject then decide to refuse the result, Loos obligated himself to buy the painting. Loos’s generosity was put to a quick test when, in the autumn of 1909, Kokoschka drew the great Swiss zoologist Auguste Forel. The scientist rejected his portrait, complaining that it made him appear as though he had suffered a stroke. Two years later, Forel had a stroke. Loos was convinced Kokoschka possessed prophetic vision.

In 1910, Kokoschka, always restless, moved to Berlin. Where Vienna was ancient, leisurely, beautiful, and accustomed to being the center of an empire, Berlin was comparatively young, brash, ugly, and dynamic. Kokoschka found its modernity stimulating, particularly contact with such expressionist artists as Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Max Pechstein. These and other painters and sculptors proclaimed the direct rendering (hence, “expression”) of emotions as the primary purpose of art, subordinating to that goal all considerations of line, form, and balance. They were willing to distort representational design to convey sensations forcibly. Kokoschka found himself clearly identified with the expressionist movement by his use of agitated lines, sonorous colors, and heavily psychological themes.

Kokoschka was fortunate enough to attract two enthusiastic patrons in Berlin: Paul Cassirer and Herwarth Walden. Cassirer, wealthy and well connected, owned a highly successful gallery. In 1910, he showed twenty-seven of Kokoschka’s oils, then acted as his publicist for several years. Walden founded an influential weekly magazine of the arts, Der Sturm (the storm). Kokoschka became its deputy editor and contributed at least one drawing to every issue. Kokoschka did a superb portrait of Walden, stressing the contrast between his generally academic, gaunt appearance and thick, sensual mouth in a spidery, scratchy sketch.

In 1911, Kokoschka returned to Vienna for an exhibition featuring twenty-five of his paintings. To his disappointment, the reviewers’ response was even more hostile than it had been in 1909; one writer excoriated his work as putrescent, calcified, and depraved. Hurt and humiliated, Kokoschka developed considerable paranoia toward a city that seemed to insist on rejecting the most talented Austrian painter of his generation.

By 1912, Kokoschka was twenty-six, tall, blond, thin, and taciturn, his eyes a remarkably deep blue, and confident that, despite Viennese derogation, he had already attained a significant place in contemporary art. He had had no serious romantic involvement. On April 14, 1912, however, he met and instantly fell in love with Vienna’s perhaps most celebrated woman: Alma Mahler, then thirty-three. Herself a painter’s daughter, Mahler had wide knowledge of the arts and was erotically drawn to men of talent. She had married the great composer-conductor Gustav Mahler in 1902, even though he was twenty years her elder. She became an ambitious host, met many men, and had many affairs. One was with the German architect Walter Gropius, whom she had pursued assiduously; another was with a famed biologist. Her stepfather asked Kokoschka to paint her portrait. According to her (often unreliable) memoirs, he was so overcome by her magnetism at the first sitting that he rushed out of the studio, wrote a passionate declaration of love, and sent it to her within the hour.

They made a curious couple: Mahler was a grande dame, socially expert and poised; Kokoschka was a fledgling artist, shy and insecure; not surprisingly, she dominated their turbulent romance. Whereas Kokoschka surrendered wholly to the pains and pleasures of Eros, Mahler, while attracted to his raw energy, often held her feelings and person in check and regularly left Vienna without him, presumably for trysts with other lovers. For more than three years she drove him to distraction. Their liaison inspired some of Kokoschka’s best work. He painted her in diverse Madonna or whore guises, himself as a suffering Christ. In what may be his greatest picture and is certainly his most ambitious, Die Windsbraut (the tempest), the clearly identifiable lovers lie in a boat resembling a gigantic seashell, shrouded in the swirling mists of another world, their bark floating above a moonlit, mountainous landscape, their love perhaps too powerful to remain earthbound. The dominant color is, however, a subdued, cold blue-green.

The June, 1914, assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand ignited World War I by late August. Kokoschka decided on a grand gesture: In early 1915, he sold Die Windsbraut for enough money to buy a mare and joined a cavalry regiment usually receptive only to the sons of nobility or wealth. On the eve of his enlistment, he painted a superb self-portrait, Der irrende Ritter (the knight errant), with himself as a wounded warrior, clad in full armor, on the verge of death, prostrate in an attitude of surrender to stormy elements. Attending him are what may be an angel of death and also a half-bestial woman resembling Mahler. The portrait proved, like many of his portraits, premonitory.

As soon as Kokoschka had enlisted, Mahler revived her affair with Gropius. She and Kokoschka corresponded through early July, 1915; nevertheless, she married Gropius on August 18 and had a daughter by October. Meanwhile, Kokoschka’s regiment saw hard combat on the eastern front. On August 29, he was shot in the head, then bayonetted in the chest by a Russian soldier, barely escaping death. The head injury, damaging his inner ear, affected Kokoschka’s sense of balance for the rest of his life. Volunteering for frontal duty again in 1916, he was seriously shell-shocked in Italy. Deeply scarred both emotionally and physically, Kokoschka decided in 1918 to accept an art professorship in Dresden, Germany.

Confused and vulnerable, Kokoschka retreated into a world of imagery and fantasy. He had a life-size doll made in Mahler’s image, then made drawings of it and carried it into restaurants and theaters with him. A guest decapitated the doll at a party given in the doll’s honor. Next morning the police came, investigating the report of a headless corpse in Kokoschka’s garden. Gradually Kokoschka recovered his emotional balance, helped by the challenge of his teaching duties at Dresden’s Academy of Art. His painting became less adventurous and intense as he turned his attention increasingly to undisturbing cityscapes. As his work lost wildness, it gained in popularity: He had well-received exhibitions throughout the 1920’s, particularly at Venice in 1921 and Zurich in 1927.

When the academy wanted to name him its rector, Kokoschka flinched from such an administrative burden and reasserted his nomadic urges. From 1924 to 1934, while usually maintaining an apartment in Paris, he roamed most of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Some critics dubbed him “the Cook’s Tour painter.” The landscapes that he produced during this period tended to avoid difficult aesthetic problems while concentrating on picturesque motifs.

After the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January, 1933, anti-Semitic campaigns were immediately organized. One early consequence was the expulsion of Max Liebermann from the presidency of the Prussian Academy of Arts, which he had held for twelve years. Within days, in May, 1933, Kokoschka, himself Roman Catholic, wrote a warm letter in Liebermann’s behalf. When Kokoschka’s mother died in 1934, he moved to Prague, whose political atmosphere he preferred to that of either Germany or Austria. There he painted what became his most famous portrait: an allegorical depiction of Czechoslovakia’s head of state Tomáš Masaryk. On Masaryk’s left stands the philosopher Comenius, pointing to a chart illustrating the five senses.

In Germany, the propaganda against modernism in the arts reached its apex with a 1937 exhibition of “degenerate art” in Munich. Nine of Kokoschka’s portraits were shown. He responded by painting himself in an oil that he entitled Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist .

In 1935, Kokoschka met the woman who was to become his only wife. Olda Palkovska, daughter of a Prague art connoisseur, was much younger than he but unusually mature, courageous, imaginative, and practical. She ideally complemented his impulsive, eccentric nature. It was Olda who insisted that, with Germany threatening Czechoslovakia’s independence, they flee to England in October, 1938.

Although his reputation on the European continent was by now immense, Kokoschka found himself still unheralded in England; London art circles tended to lag behind in recognizing advanced styles. During World War II, he produced a number of patriotic, politically symbolic paintings, such as the 1941 Red Egg and the 1943 What We Are Fighting For. Critics generally dismiss these works as conventional and uninspired. In 1947, he became a British subject, repudiating his right to Austrian citizenship.

Kokoschka’s innovative, indeed revolutionary, years as an artist were now far behind him. He painted portraits and landscapes for another generation of his long life but broke no new ground. He did, however, extend his subject matter to classical mythology and designed the sets for several operatic productions, including a celebrated 1955 Salzburg staging of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute. By all counts his proudest post-World War II achievement was the establishment of an art academy in Salzburg, Die Schule des Sehens (the school of seeing), in which he taught summer classes from 1952 to 1962. From 1953 onward, he and Olda resided in the village of Villeneuve, near Montreux, Switzerland. After his death, Austria, which had so often belittled his talents, established an Oskar Kokoschka Prize for outstanding achievement in the visual arts.

Significance

Oskar Kokoschka was indisputably Austria’s foremost modern painter; whether his achievement is distinguished enough to rank him with such world masters as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, and Willem de Kooning is, however, highly dubious. His outstanding success was rooted in his frequently profound exposition of the inner life of his subjects. In his often brilliantly perceptive portraits, particularly those he did before World War I, he realized the vital roles of dreams and fantasies in releasing the loneliness, broken hearts, and other sorrows that often afflicted his subjects.

Bibliography

Cernuschi, Claude. Re/casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Interpretive study of Kokoschka’s early expressionist portraits, placing his work within the context of the artistic, political, and intellectual life of Vienna at the turn of the last century. Explains how Kokoschka and his patrons sought to distinguish expression from Art Nouveau and sought to create a new form of art that would reveal the truth of human emotions.

Hodin, John Paul. Oskar Kokoschka: The Artist and His Time. New York: Graphic Society, 1966. A distinguished art historian and critic, Hodin was a close friend of Kokoschka who worked intermittently on this text for twenty years. He considers his subject a profound artist and sage; nowhere does he note any of Kokoschka’s limitations.

Hoffman, Edith. Kokoschka: Life and Work. London: Faber & Faber, 1947. Hoffman, a Central European refugee residing in London, has written a perceptive study of Kokoschka’s art. Her biographical material is, unfortunately, sometimes curtailed: Kokoschka insisted that she not describe his three-year liaison with Alma Mahler or his involvement with several other women.

Kokoschka, Oskar. My Life. Translated by David Britt. New York: Macmillan, 1974. The artist was eighty-five when he dictated these reminiscences of his life. While he occasionally confuses his fantasies with factual evidence, Kokoschka is unfailingly interesting as he evokes, through many anecdotes, his richly eventful career.

Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Selz’s text is the most authoritative account in English of the expressionist movement, which branched off into such schools as the Bridge, Blue Rider, and Vienna Secession. While Selz devotes only about fifteen pages to Kokoschka, his analysis of his development is trenchant.

Whitford, Frank. Oskar Kokoschka: A Life. New York: Atheneum, 1986. A British lecturer in the history of art, Whitford writes smoothly and gracefully. He focuses on Kokoschka’s biography, covering essentially the same ground that My Life did, and undertakes surprisingly little interpretation of the painter’s work.