Victory Over Terror

...Except for the fact that he knows that his days are coming to an end, O.K...

...His eyes are light, penetratingly sharp, ironic, and filled with the youthfulness of a twenty-year-old rascal...

...He journeyed all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East...

...When, to improve the situation, I observed that Titian had lived to be ninety-nine and done his noblest work in his last years, Kokoschka smiled wryly...

...There was a "Gay Vienna," and, radically different from it, one that read the books of Sigmund Freud, listened to the music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, admired the modernistic architecture of Adolph Loos, and bought Kokoschka's shockingly Expressionist paintings...

...Vienna suddenly re-discovered him, and gave him, a worjd-celebrated man, his first large show in Austria, and gave me, a young critic, the first opportunity to acquaint myself with his work...

...Mention must also be made of O.K...

...Be it a portrait or a landscape (and what else is a Kokoschka landscape but a living face, drawn by one for whom everything is anthropomorphic...

...presided in London over a group of Austrian refugees whose political goals were opposed to those held by Otto von Hapsburg, the pretender to the throne...

...Victory over Terror by ALFRED WERNER OF ALL who have tried to sum up the importance and significance of Oskar Kokoschka, the Austrian painter and playwright, no one has succeeded as well as Werner Hofmann, director of Vienna's Museum of the Twentieth Century, in his excellent volume, Modern Painting in Austria: ". . . he wanted to stir the middle classes out of their complacency, but he was not after uproar simply as a strategic advertising trick...

...the function is never lost...

...I also recall that during World War II, O.K...

...looks more like a tall, erect Alpine farmer than a painter, with his weather-beaten face and the cunning, sly expression one finds on rustics who are difficult to please and suspicious by nature...

...Fundamentally, his early oils—like the celebrated likeness of the scientist Auguste Forel, or that prized possession of New York's Museum of Modern Art, the double-portrait of Professor Hans Tietze and his wife— are not much different from portraits he executed in the Fifties and during the last few years, and the same can be said of Kokoschka's landscapes...

...Behind his mockery of a society which betrayed in all its deeds the ideas which it professed, Kokoschka concealed a fanatical humanity . . . This deeply human concern is the driving force behind Kokoschka's life work...

...Even so, Kokoschka is the painter of "actors": each one of his sitters (his "victims," as he calls them), who include scientists, scholars, writers, musicians, and statesmen, is playing a part, a role—grimacing, gesticulating, or just simply "being" in an unforgettably dramatic way...

...Oskar Kokoschka is indeed an artist—and a man...

...His show was coupled with an invitation to return home...

...If in Kokoschka's work there is much gesturing of frighteningly expressive hands and wild staring of eyes, each picture, nonetheless, remains within the frame...

...It makes him the one and only Austrian painter of ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic and historian...

...To honor the artist on his eightieth birthday, the Marlborough Galleries in New York recently showed one hundred and twenty oils, watercolors, gouaches, drawings, and lithographs, from works done in 1908 to those of 1966...

...He is clearly related to the creators of great "machines," from Tintoretto to Tiepolo, who had disciples among the gifted decorators of churches and monasteries in Austria...

...Kokoschka was then still in his mid-twenties, yet he had already found his own style...

...Looking into those unforgettable eyes, I could easily believe all the spicy stories told about the master who years ago was involved in a highly publicized love affair...

...He hated the repercussions of his birthday—unwanted interviewers, a heap of congratulatory mail, unnecessary excitement...

...In 1937, Kokoschka was just past fifty...

...Never is there anything static about his work...

...Perhaps it is this contradictoriness of character that makes O.K...

...In Czechoslovakia, where he became a friend of the statesman and philosopher, Tomas Masaryk, he was forced by the threat of the Nazi invasion to flee to England, and there he used his prestige to aid all those fighting Fascism...

...Kokoschka firmly holds on to his convictions, and is eager to voice them...

...appear so typically Austrian...

...He finds Kandinsky too cold, too intellectual...

...Inside the buildings, Kokoschka could see huge pictures whose makers had tried to find a synthesis, a solution, by transforming matter into timeless music...

...While his observation that today's art world is filled with incompetents and charlatans may not be too wide of the mark, he seems unduly harsh on the still struggling, still experimenting, still groping young...

...He was referring, of course, to Matthias Grunewald, son of an age that, with its conquests of foreign land, its Reformation, and civil wars, was almost as violent as our time...

...While not every one of the large number of his works is an indisputable masterpiece, there can be no doubt that among them, especially those of the first two decades of his career, there are many which have given luster to the term, "Expressionism...

...Still, he felt that he had to leave his native country to escape suffocation in an atmosphere of hypocrisy and make-believe...

...For his homeland was full of unresolved conflicts, and still is...

...you will share in that feeling of cosmic uncertainty, of universal fear, of metaphysical loneliness that no Twentieth Century artist has explored more frequently and more bravely...

...He is no longer interested in articles written about him, for there are so many of them: "They would have come in handy when I was a young man, or when I lived in England and nobody bothered to take any notice of the refugee from Nazism...

...To ferret out his retreat in Ville-neuve was no easy thing, for of the many people I asked for directions to Kokoschka's villa only one really knew who and where he was...

...in 1948 he was given a retrospective show, which was seen in six American cities...

...As a dragoon, Kokoschka was severely wounded in the war...

...Probably Germany has seen nothing so wild and fantastic expressed in colors since the death of Grunewald," a critic declared after seeing a Kokoschka show in Berlin...

...Archduke Francis Ferdinand—the man whose assassination was to unleash World War I—left the exhibition hall in a rage: "That fellow deserves to have every bone in his body broken...

...His life had been extraordinary...

...seems to be a contented man...

...This was the first major Kokoschka exhibition here in eighteen years...

...He grew up in the vicinity of one of the finest specimens of Baroque art, the Benedictine monastery, built by the great architect, Prandtauer, high above the Danube village of Melk...

...Curiously, then, we have in Kokoschka a man both modern and "old...

...The charges of "irregularity" and "capriciousness," of "illogicality" and "lack of structure," that were leveled against Baroque art were heard again when Kokoschka's work was reviewed...

...Three decades ago, when my interest in Kokoschka was aroused, I would have liked nothing more than to talk to O.K.—as he signs his pictures—but he was then living in the still independent and democratic Czechoslovakia...

...He reacted to this insult with a painting, the now famous Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist...

...He violently dislikes all abstract art...

...Kokoschka is a theatrical man in the best sense of the term...

...Born in 1886 in a small town in Lower Austria, he had raised a furor in the art world of Vienna when he was only twenty-two...

...Yet O.K...

...Kokoschka has, apart from the Bach-Kantata lithographs, done little on a Christian theme...

...The Nazis might have thrown him into a concentration camp, but he was out of their reach...

...This huge, sprawling, yellowish building with majestic squat towers might be called "victory over terror," and this is also what Kokoschka's work appears to be: the triumph of vigor, imagination, and spiritual fervor over the belligerent mediocrity that so often terrorized the land of his birth...

...I smiled when I heard him say, in a firm, unfaltering voice, that he had been an admirer of the Hapsburgs— did this admiration also include Francis Ferdinand?—and that he considered the destruction of the Austro-Hungar-ian Empire the worst blow to Europe...

...Oddly, O.K.'s art is nearer to Austria's Baroque than to modern art...

...But you need not look for the "O.K...

...Indeed, he should have been given all the stages of the major art centers for his forceful brush when he was still young— alas, the decorations for the Salzburg Festival's Magic Flute did not come until he was seventy...

...Modern he is in his unstudied, ferocious application of paint, and in the breadth of his subject matter, but one need only look at any of his pictures, chosen at random, to recognize in him the special case of a Baroque sensibility transplanted into our time...

...Those who saw the Marlborough show could not help admire the constant flow of a vivid imagination, unrestrained by any extra-artistic motivations...

...The only thing that betrayed his age was the slowness of his movements...

...He has found time for teaching in the United States and in Salzburg, where he founded the International Summer School for the Visual Arts, and for lecturing...

...But the overture came too late to make any impression upon him, and the authoritarian spirit by then prevailing""*^ his native land was hardly to his liking...

...When I finally got a chance for that long talk with him, he had just turned eighty...

...Kokoschka and his Czech-born wife became British subjects, and, after Hitler was defeated, eventually settled in Switzerland...

...He is a contributing editor of Arts magazine and has had two new books published this season: " M o d i g l i a n i " (Abrams) and "Barlach" our century who was able to combine his artistic intuition with an ideological intelligence and political instinct...

...The decorators of Melk were grappling, through visual media, with metaphysical bliss and distress...

...For Baroque is more than flowing scrolls, florid decoration, mechanized puppet shows, and formal gardens, and to Kokoschka, at least, it meant revolutionary fight rather than the lassitude of repose...

...I extended my felicitations, but I should not have brought up the subject—-O.K...

...Kokoschka, dark-haired, gaunt, friendly but reserved, led the way to her husband...

...The technique changes...

...Nevertheless, there is in his work, notably in his "distorted" delineations of contemporary men and women, some of the same graphic intensity, that baroque ecstasy that makes Grunewald's Isenheim Al-tarpiece one of the great monuments of art...

...Altogether, those Austrians who covered the ceilings of cupolas with weightless figures, gesticulating amidst whirlpools of clouds, anticipated, as it were, O.K.'s huge triptychs, and even his townscapes and landscapes, seemingly painted as though to serve as backdrops for theatrical performances...

...He has the big hands of a laborer, yet the high forehead of a thinker...

...has often been compared to an artist who lived and worked about the year 1500...

...they exposed to the jeering of Philistines in Munich some of the four hundred of his works they had confiscated in German museums...

...there is greater looseness in his more recent work, and different moods prevail...

...Was he really eighty...

...in a corner to recognize the artistic handwriting—-the analytic, violent strokes...

...Kokoschka's father, a Czech goldsmith from Prague, belonged to one of the minorities which rebelled against their German and Hungarian-speaking masters and contributed to the dissolution of the Empire...

...In an essay on Bohemian Baroque churches, the artist once noted with grim satisfaction that the term "degenerate" applied to him by the Nazis had also, at one time, been used in arguments against Baroque artists...

...He continues to add to his life work, which by now comprises about five hundred oils, including some that are enormously large, many prints, innumerable drawings and water colors, a few sculptures, as well as the decor and costumes for several theatrical productions...

...as the author of several interesting, if rather weird, Expressionist plays, and of poems, essays, and narrative prose...

...loathes being reminded of his age...

...After it ended, he taught in Dresden for a few years but gave up teaching for freedom to work and travel...

...He had fled there from Nazi Germany...

...There, in a garden overlooking the soft-blue Lake Geneva, I found the Kokoschkas' share of heaven on earth...