Mr. Oxygen

Into the Vienna gallery strode the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the crowns of Austria and Hungary. He took one look at the exhibition, and cried out in horror: "This man's bones should be broken in his body!" The violent paintings and portraits, with their savage slashes of color, their gnarled hands and twisted faces, didn't please the critics either. "Disgusting plague sores," one critic called them. "Puddles of foul stink." And the artist, he added, was "a mangy creature."

The mangy creature, Oskar Kokoschka, was only 24 at the time (1911), but he was already storming his shocking way to the top of the Viennese art world. "Our art is being ruined by good taste," the young Austrian rebels had said; Kokoschka had set out to save art from that ruination. He was a wild and moody young man, a writer in his spare time of wild and moody plays that set the audience to battling with umbrellas in the aisles.

A Few Pagodas. The son of a poor Czech goldsmith, Oskar Kokoschka briefly earned a living decorating fans and postcards, or betting U.S. tourists he could drink them under the table. His formal education was slight, "acquired through reading under my school desk. Therefore my intellect resembles a Tibetan desert, with a few pagodas here & there." During World War I, he achieved a brief respectability by joining the dragoons, because he liked the uniform. But he always kept his private pledge: never to shoot the enemy.

In Germany he became known as "the mad Kokoschka," but he also acquired a following that regarded him as a genius and one of the most brilliant of the expressionists. His ambitious, spectacular townscapes, painted from rooftops and turret windows, and signed "O.K.," found their way into museums all over Europe. He himself found his way into the homes of nobles and notables, doing portraits. Among his sitters: Thomas Masaryk, whom Kokoschka adored: "A dried, shriveled apple with a million wrinkles," he called him, "[but] a real aristocrat."

Dawn & Lightning. Denounced by Hitler as the most degenerate of degenerate artists, Kokoschka fled from Prague to London. Now, though he keeps his flat in London, he prefers to wander from city to city, "an immensely free citizen of the world," painting as the dawn breaks around him, or on-stormy nights when the lightning plays. Last week, two of his latest works were on display in a Manhattan gallery. They were portraits, one of a bemused art collector, the other of a wistful clown, standing against a gaudy carnival background, gazing over the head of an absurd little dog. Although the bright slashes of color were still there, some of the old violence seemed gone.

But at 62, Kokoschka, who thinks little of Picasso, was still as self-assured as ever. "Though I am no great painter," he said last week in Venice, "I prefer my own pictures to any other. Art is dying; I am its oxygen. When Kokoschka is finished, true art will be finished."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.