The changing phases of Oskar Kokoschka's art are like great stepping-stones through the twentieth century. Haunted by man's inhumanity to his own kind, he staggered and reeled from the effects of two major world conflicts, and was driven by a desire to better the world. Kokoschka created some of the first existential images of alienated modern man. Yet, he rejoiced in the simplest of pleasures. He reveled in great music and theater, for which he not only designed sets but wrote dramas. The entire range of his protean talent can now be viewed in a huge traveling retrospective honoring the centennial of his birth. The exhibition opened at the Tate Gallery in London, is currently at the Kunsthaus in Aurich, and in December will come to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Kokoschka's training ground was fin-de-siecle Vienna, an efflorescence of culture that included a rich cast of artists, musicians, philosophers, and writers. Not the least of them was Sigmund Freud. Like other Austrian Expressionists, Kokoschka began as a graphic artist, which accounts in part for the draftsmanship that characterizes his early portraits.
Stunning, vivid, immediate, these portraits in oil concentrate on agonized faces and desperate hands, often leaving clothing and background blank. Fine lines etched with fingernail or brush handle, like frayed nerve ends, give a febrile intensity to the expressions. Features carved in red suggest veins convulsed by electric current. The eyes crackle. Kokoschka's jarring originality frequently disturbed his subjects, who found themselves unflatteringly aged. Strangely, the models often grew to resemble Kokoschka's images. Penetrating to their inner selves, he had made them aware of their own morality.
But Kokoschka's treatment was not antipathetic; he only painted people with whom he felt a certain affinity. "I cannot paint everybody," he said. "It is only people who are on my antennae." In the various stages of his life, he painted many self-portraits, which are of great importance in his oeuvre. Moreover, in his later years he would project features of his own physiognomy - his truculent chin and broad mouth - onto the faces of others.
In 1910 and 1911 Kokoschka developed contacts in the more cosmopolitan art world of Berlin, where he encountered the works of old masters. Until then, only Van Gogh exerted a visible influence on him; now he was inspired by El Greco, and soon by Titian and Tintoretto. His art was transformed by a new understanding of light and color, and a more mature use of the brush. A sparkling translucency of creamy pastels is evident in Alpen Landscape, Murren. In Two Nudes (1912), moreover, he introduced a fragmented crystalline structure suggestive of cubism; Kokoschka was experimenting with a prism.
His most memorable painting of this period is an insightful portrait of Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler. In pastel rose and blue, she reincarnates the Mona Lisa. The scooped neckline of the gown, the curtain, the city in the background are directly inherited from da Vinci, but the smile is demonic, and the eyes are riveted in self-absorption. Kokoschka met Alma Mahler in 1912, and his tempestuous two-and-a -half-year affair with her inspired his most violent feeling.
During his romance with Alma, his palette became lighter, his paintings more robust and joyful.
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