ARTS
Exhibitions
Oskar Kokoschka 1886-1980 (Tate Gallery till 10 August)
The great survivor
Giles Auty
At the Tate Gallery's official opening of Oskar Kokoschka 1886-1980, sponsored by United Technologies Corporation, a colleague, who knew Kokoschka, com- mented on the irony: 'Oskar hated technol- ogy, of course.' While such knowledge must not diminish our gratitude to this or other commercial patrons, the remark reminded me that artists of earlier generations were more outspoken and less well house-trained than the current breed. Kokoschka was born 100 years ago and lived on almost to his 94th birthday. In his lifestyle and attitudes, Kokoschka was closer to the artist of fiction than to his present-day counter- parts. Too many artists I meet these days would belong more naturally in the com- pany of accountants and advertising men than competing in the kind of fiercely intellectual atmosphere of Kokoschka's youth in Vienna. Kokoschka believed passionately in the efficacy of painting to change and enlight- en mankind. Art which lacked feeling and which leant over too far towards the decorative and cerebral could not achieve such ends; from the Fifties onwards Ko- koschka viewed the spread of abstract art with grave miggivings. Kokoschka was born in Austria in 1886 and from 1905 to 1909 attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. His early training in graphics and illustration may partly explain the linear emphasis of much of his early and later painting. In between, Kokoschka went through a 'painterly' period while teaching at the Academy in Dresden, a town in which he had previous- ly convalesced from severe injuries he suffered in the first world war. Many see the artist's Dresden paintings as the revela- tions of the current exhibition, yet not all are particularly good. Thus 'Dresden, the Elbe Bridges (with figure from behind)' (1923) strikes me as far superior to — and less mannered than — 'Dresden, Neustadt V' (1922). However, the latter shows more clearly the influence of the painters of Die Briicke. Almost inevitably, therefore, lov- ers of art historical theory, rather than simply of painting, would reverse my judg- ment. Modern art historians' outlooks and priorities are oddly uniform and almost entirely due to their training. From this same period, Kokoschka's 'Self Portrait with Doll' records an interesting and not wholly explained incident from the artist's career. The doll referred to was life-size and fashioned as precisely as possible in the image of Alma Mahler, the artist's former lover. Perhaps the real secret of the doll's attraction lay simply in her total Drawing of 'Karl Kraus I' (1910), from private collection.
silence and in her ability to keep still, qualities too seldom obtainable in young, living models.
We should remember that Kokoschka grew up in an era when it was fashionable to shock. Much of the untold misery subsequently inflicted on unwary patrons of performance art or fringe theatre had its roots in this period. The artist's own strenuous efforts to penetrate and break down the unthinking patterns of the bourgeois mind are evidenced not only in the nervous violence of many of his early images but in the elusively symbolic nature of the play or 'happening' he devised: Murderer Hope of Women.
The Tate Gallery exhibition is very sensibly laid out to give visitors an easy-to- follow chronology of the artist's growth and change. Among early works, the influ- ence of Van Gogh can be clearly seen. Yet the portraits of Adolf Loos and Franz Hauer which display this trend most clearly are interspersed, interestingly, by contem- porary works of a different source and nature. After leaving Dresden in 1923, Kokoschka travelled widely, visiting 11 different European countries as well as north Africa and the Middle East over the next seven years. Many of his great city- scapes, including those of the Thames painted from the Savoy, date from this period. It was as though, having narrowly escaped death in the war, the artist was anxious to see as much as possible of the world from which he had nearly been snatched. The size and seriousness of London impressed Kokoschka greatly; it was in this country that he subsequently sought refuge shortly before the second world war. Although taking British citizenship in 1947, the artist thereafter resumed his travels, spending much of his remaining life in Switzerland.
In spite of his undeniable contribution to two essentially 'modern' movements, Ex- pressionism and Symbolism, Kokoschka preferred to see himself as the lone survi- vor of a great European tradition. Here a comparison with Picasso, his almost exact contemporary, has a certain relevance. Kokoschka had little time either for Picas- so or Matisse although both, after early skirmishes with exclusively 20th-century styles, similarly refreshed themselves from the reservoirs of tradition. It could be said that while, in many respects, Kokoschka was no less identifiably 'modern' than either, he was less self-consciously or formally so. Through his extensive portrai- ture, Kokoschka has been credited with the first convincing record of modern, alienated man. Kokoschka never strayed from the figurative in art, however person- al his interpretations. While teaching draw- ing from life at his School of Seeing at Salzburg between 1953 and 1963, Ko- koschka's methods were nevertheless the reverse of old-fashioned academic didac- ticism; he preferred to view art as simply one of the avenues leading to vital self- discovery. While this philosophical aspect of the artist's aesthetic theories may, in hindsight, seem unremarkable, it should be valued, historically, in the light of the educational barbarism which was increa- singly taking place elsewhere. Kokoschka rightly viewed continual, direct contact with nature as the best counter against the threat of an increasingly dehumanised soci- ety. The prevailing artistic climate of the decade in question now seems hard to credit, yet it was one in which most ambitious young artists would sooner own up to anything than be seen, by their fellows, sketching in the countryside.
Kokoschka remains a difficult artist to classify or assess. For many, judgment had already effectively been made at the time of the earlier Tate Gallery retrospective of 1962. Such a view fails to take into account the artist's late paintings which have gener- ally attracted the same kind of reservations as the late works of Renoir. Physical powers unquestionably decline and it is hard not to colour judgment of paintings such as 'The Duke and Duchess of Hamil- ton' (1969) by recognition that the artist was 83 at the time.
In the case of Renoir's late works, ardent feminists and most young critics dislike the buxom, rosy images themselves rather than their manner of execution. But, as in the case of Kokoschka, I cannot concur. Renoir's roseate works were an old man's understandable dreams of fairness and amplitude. Too many generations view their seniors merely as boring or senile; thus the richness of the late works of Kokoschka, like that of Renoir or Rem- brandt, is simply the wrong diet for the young or intolerant.
Once, at a party in Dorset, I was warned to avoid a certain colonel — 'dreadful old bore'. By heeding this advice too late I met a lonely, modest old man who had prob- ably done more in his life than the rest of the assembled throng put together.
How unfair that age, unlike youth, should be incurable.
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