Painting his own portrait
colhi Wilson My Life Oscar Kokoschka (Thames and Hudson £5.25) Let me say at once that I suspect this is one of the great artistic autobiographies, comparable to those of Berlioz and Yeats. At the age of eighty-five Kokoschka has attempted a elf
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portrait in words. As you might expect from is painting, this is no straightforward mirror-image. Kokoschka is obsessed by motion, and this word-portrait is more like a reflection on a moving stream. The result is strange and elusive, and sometimes evasive and infuriating, but always fascinating. Should a man wait till old age before writing of his life — which is more than half-forgotten? In the case of Kokoschka, yes. Although undoubtedly one of the greatest artists of this century he is, to be frank, a curiously un-unified personality. One of his main drives has always been the desire to create an impression. In his early days in Vienna, he actually seemed to want to provoke the kind of scandal that had been caused by the Impressionists and postimpressionists. (He doesn't say so, but it is not difficult to read between the lines.) He wrote plays with provocative titles like Murderer, Hope of Women, and he recounts with satisfaction that the police had to be called to keep order at a first performance. Later, he developed another interesting trick to gain publicity: he would have large posters printed, and then displayed all over a city — Vienna, Prague, Berlin, London (he tried it in all of them). In short, he is the sort of character whom, if he did not possess genius, we would dismiss as an exhibitionist. So, of course, was Berlioz. But Berlioz's egotism was so frank and unashamed that, like Rousseau's, it finally becomes one of the chief virtues of his Memoirs. Kokoschka, on the other hand, seems to have set out to repress signs of self-love. For example, after mentioning Rilke, Thomas Mann,. Hofmannsthal and various other great names in one paragraph, he apologises to the reader for name-dropping — an absurd inhibition, since this is precisely what the reader wants him to do. In describing his love affair with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer, he begins by half-denying her charge that he virtually kept her a prisoner through jealousy and then, in the course of the next few pages, makes it clear that he did precisely that. He says, penetratingly, that after Mahler's death she missed the atmosphere of celebrity that surrounded her husband, but he is only half-candid about his own jealousy of Mahler's celebrity which finally destroyed the love between himself and Alma Mahler. In a later chapter, he remarks that he has seldom had close relationships with writers and painters although he has been friendly with many musicians. It is not difficult to guess that his own egotism made him shy away from other egotists. He mentions, significantly, that he like Fiirtwangler, but declined to paint Toscanini because "In place of a heart, I thoought he must have a metronome." FUrtwangler was, of course, a gentle, unassertive man; Toscanini was another fierce
egotist.
Perhaps this makes him sound a rather detestable character, without even the virtue of true frankness, but this is not so because his is not an essentially petty character. What has always surprised me about Kokoschk'a's career is that, although one of the greatest painters of this century, he has never become a household name, like Picasso or Matisse. In a postscript to this book, an art critic denies that Kokoschka is
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an Impressionist; but he has always seemed to me the last, and perhaps the greatest, of the Impressionists. To be persistently underrated, an artist needs a thick skin of egotism and self-belief. Besides — and now, I realise, I am defending him against my own attack — he has sound artistic reasons for not baring his heart in the manner of Rousseau. He sees himself as the child of a terrifying century. Understandably, an underlying tone of pessimism runs through his book: "Berlin, however; was in a twilight zone; the past had already lost its character, the future had not yet acquired one. People had not learned to fear the transformation of society into an incoherent, undifferentiated mass, nor could they foresee this would be the inevitable result of releasing the latent energy in great urban populations." This tone, reminiscent of Jacob Burckhardt, runs through the book. He states repeatedly that he feels that life has the character of a dream. Yet what he wants to do is to convey some impression of his own individual life against that great canvas of the twentieth century, with its disasters and upheavals. Kokoschka saw it all. He grew up in Franz Josef's Austria, was seriously wounded and shell-shocked in the first world war, and had to flee Prague to avoid the Nazis (who had proclaimed him a degenerate artist) before the second. Yeats's great autobiography gives an unforgettable picture of the 1890s; you could say that Kokoschka takes up where Yeats left off. Once again we are seeing a period of upheaval through the eyes of the intensely subjective artist. Like Rupert Brooke, Kokoschka welcomed the first world war as an escap,e from his own emotional confusions. He was luckier than Brooke; he experienced a kind of rebirth through the holocaust. It has taken him a long time to achieve objectivity. But finally, it is the objectivity that gives this book its touch of greatness. He has succeeded in doing what Pasternak did so superbly in Zhivago — conveying a picture of an individual against a background of tremendous events. The fact that this individual admits that he possesses no sense of his own destiny only makes it more poignant. I began reading this book strongly predisposed towards Kokoschka. Halfway through, I found myself beginning to dislike him. But by the end of the book, I saw that my likes and dislikes are irrelevant. What makes him so remarkable is that, like all great artists, he is a kind of prism. His personality makes no
difference; what emerges at the end is pure and completely impersonal. Almost by accident, he has produced a major document of the artist's life.
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