Word: kokoschka
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Over there, across the park, one saw the works of Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and others. The viewer could imagine what demons stood behind them: the creeping Jew, the scheming Bolshevik, the Negro with his thick lips and saxophone, the slavering pervert. In here it was all David and the Apollo Belvedere, noble simplicity and calm grandeur as $ interpreted by such heirs of Michelangelo and Polyclitus as Hitler's favorite sculptor Arno Breker and his court painter Adolf Ziegler. What kind of Germany, the two shows asked, do you want...
...self-education was wide but shallow. Vienna was peopled with brilliant artists and thinkers; Sigmund Freud's researches, Arnold Schoenberg's music, Oskar Kokoschka's paintings, Arthur Schnitzler's plays, all had their roots in the city. But Hitler dismissed modern art as "decadent." To the impotent and solitary figure, power was what mattered, not aesthetics. The Ring of the Nibelung proved more fascinating for the drama than for the music. "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany," Hitler often said, "must know Wagner." Particularly the heroic, irrational world of blood and fire...
Some artists have a flair for creating maestrohood from a succession of scandals; Kokoschka was one. Almost from the moment he left art school he assumed center stage in the Viennese avant-garde, enacting its fixations on love and death, abandonment and deviancy. Painting apart, he worked hard to earn his nickname "der Tolle" (the crazy man). George Grosz remembered him at a ball in Berlin, gnawing on the fresh and bloody bone of an ox. He sometimes hid among the waxworks of criminals in the chamber of horrors of the Berlin Panoptikum, and sprang out with a howl...
...knight-errant was the right figure for him. Kokoschka had to work in Germany because the decorative traditions of Vienna could not, in the end, contain the intensity he wanted to project into painting. And just as surely, he had to leave Germany because of Hitler. In 1937 he painted a big-jawed self portrait, titled Portrait of a "Degenerate Artist," which commemorated his inclusion in the Nazi exhibition of "Degenerate Art." A figure among the trees, in the background on the left, sketchily furnishes the key: it is the Adam from Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise. Kokoschka was being...
...postwar years, during which Kokoschka cast himself as a maestro appointed to pull the great European figurative tradition out of the grip of abstraction, his art declined in vitality. One soon wearies, for instance, of the view-fromthe-boardroom cityscapes of Berlin, London and New York that he turned out in some profusion for Axel Springer and other bigwigs of the postwar boom years. But to say that his talent collapsed like Chagall's is quite untrue. Chagall painted nothing but cloying ethnic kitsch for the last 30 years of his life. But in some of Kokoschka's last paintings...