Word: kokoschka
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FAMED Viennese Painter Oskar Kokoschka has long boasted that his portraits captured the secret life of his subjects. Onetime Big Time Dancer Adele Astaire, who had never seen the original, last week viewed a color reproduction of her Kokoschka portrait (see color page) for the first time since it was painted in 1926, let out a cry of anguish, posed for a photographic version, finally calmed down enough to remark, "Well, it's better to be remembered as hideous and funny than not to be noticed at all." See ART, Psychological Portraitist...
...Vienna before World War I, the maddest celebrity in town was Oskar Kokoschka. His morbid plays dramatizing strife between the sexes set off bitter café debates; his portraits turning the light on the psychological "inner life" of his subjects outraged complacent burghers. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne (whose assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 triggered World War I), gave it as his opinion that "this fellow's bones ought to be broken in his body." After the war, which dealt Kokoschka a head wound and a bayoneting, the artist moved to the front rank of avant...
This week 72-year-old Oskar Kokoschka, having outlived his tormentors, is giving Europe a mellow, retrospective look at 431 works, including many of his most famous portraits and landscapes, covering five decades of painting. Ironically, the show is in the squat, limestone House of Art in Munich that ex-Housepainter Hitler built to display a new Aryan art of beautiful supermen. In six weeks the show has drawn 45,000 visitors...
...Opener Approach. No one viewing Kokoschka's work is likely to accuse him of over-idealization (see color pages); he himself refers to his subjects, most of them close friends, as "my victims." Explains Kokoschka: "My first aim is to find a streak in the personality of the subject, something that the photographer will not be able to reproduce. I have to break through the secret law and pattern of each person, as if I were using a can opener. Then I start painting with my eyes, my heart, my nerves, my antennae...
...case of Composer Arnold Schoenberg, creator of the twelve-tone system, Avant-Gardist Kokoschka found a personality streak that he shared: a sense of persecution by the crowd. "When we talked," Kokoschka recalled last week, "it was only about the stupidity of society. We were both despised at the time. Schoenberg received many rotten eggs in the face, and I used to be called a jailbird...