PSYCHOLOGICAL PORTRAITIST

IN Vienna before World War I, the maddest celebrity in town was Oskar Kokoschka. His morbid plays dramatizing strife between the sexes set off bitter cafe 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-garde painters. Hitler disagreed, called him "degenerate" and banned his works.

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.

Can-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."

In the 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."

To meet Dancer Adele Astaire, Kokoschka was taken backstage after one of her London performances of Lady Be Good (with brother Fred). She was the toast of Mayfair, and Kokoschka asked her to pose. Now 59 and the trim-figured wife of Wall Street Broker Kingman Douglass, Adele recalls that she "thought it would be fun. I was cunning then--I was Alice in Wonderland." With her Scotty Wassie, she went to Kokoschka's Kensington studio twice a week for two months, dolled up in a Madame Jenny dress of blue velvet with a pale, pleated skirt. To her annoyance, Kokoschka never let her see the painting, and she skipped the last two sittings in a pet.

Love Under Canvas. Kokoschka, for his part, recalls Adele as a girl who danced like a dream--gay, relaxed, with beautiful legs. (But he was convinced that her eyes turned inwards and her dog's eyes outwards.) "I flirted with her a long time, and we were in love," he says impishly, and just as impishly he put Leda and the Swan in the background. "He did sort of make love to me under the canvas," says Adele. "He would look at me and purr. But I was madly in love with Prince George [later the Duke of Kent]. And I didn't have cross-eyes."

Kokoschka still thinks that art is in the artist's eye, and terms his school of painting (where he teaches students from 22 nations) the "school of vision." He scorns modern painters as "decorators for wallpaper, printed silk or men's ties" because "they do not use their eyes any more." He also unhesitatingly claims second sight. When he painted the portrait of Professor Auguste Forel, famous Swiss psychiatrist, Kokoschka made his subject look 20 years older, with his right hand drooping strangely, his right eye blind. Forel and his family protested that the portrait was a poor likeness--but four months later, just as though Psychological Portraitist Kokoschka had foreseen it, the unlucky professor suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side.

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