Word: oskar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Richard Burton, Claire Bloom and Oskar Werner in John le Carré's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold...
Some love affairs, like stately quin-queremes, sail serenely on for decades. Others founder in tempests of selfishness, or rocks of jealousy. In her 1958 memoirs, Vienna's Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel recalled her three-year affair with Painter Oskar Kokoschka as "one fierce battle of love. Never before had I tasted so much tension, so much hell, so much paradise." Never after ward, she might have added, did she in spire so many fascinating and often memorable works...
Actually, Alma appears to have been no helpless, trusting flower but a full-blooded coquette who ultimately found Oskar too demanding. When Kokoschka marched off to war in 1914, even he felt a certain sense of relief. ("It was very exhausting," he was later heard to say. "I had to climb into her room at night.") By the time he came back, Alma had become the wife of Walter Gropius, the German architect, whom she subsequently divorced in order to live with and eventually marry Franz Werfel, the novelist...
Handsome but Coarse. Oskar Kokoschka then was a young, lean, in tense nobody. He was one of the radical group of "Expressionists" who sought, with staccato rhythms and garish colors, to "express" on their canvases tormented moods and fantasies rather than to portray fashionable, naturalistic everyday scenes. "Crazy Kokoschka," his critics called him. Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who was later to die at Sarajevo, grumbled that "this fellow's bones ought to be broken...
...Oskar, the memory lingered on. Four years after their separation, Alma heard that he had acquired a life-size doll that was painted to look like her. She reported: "The doll always lay on the sofa. For days on end Kokoschka would lock himself in and talk to no one but the doll. At last, he had me where he wanted me: helpless in his hand, a docile, mechanical tool." But she too remembered, and kept the fans always with her as affectionate mementos until her death in Manhattan...