In London: a Visionary Maestro

By ROBERT HUGHES

The initials "OK," like a brusque mark of approval, are scrawled in the corners of a few of the best paintings of our century. They belonged to Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), the visionary Austrian painter whose career spanned seven decades and not a few places of exile. Born in the world of the Emperor Franz Josef, he died in that of Reagan and Thatcher, just before the expressionist revival of the '80s took hold. Recent years have seen major shows of such expressionist masters as Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, and now the 100th anniversary of O.K.'s birth is marked by a retrospective at London's Tate Gallery. (The exhibition runs through Aug. 10, and will go to Zurich in the fall and New York City in the winter.) Comprising 241 paintings and drawings, with prints and assorted memorabilia, this will be remembered as the definitive Kokoschka show. The man it reveals, in his waxing and waning powers, his conflicts, insights and gifts of draftsmanship, appears as one of the most absorbing creatures of old modernism.

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 to frighten the visitors. These early "happenings" (artist as cannibal, artist as criminal) were subtexts to the main theme of artist as primitive, untrammeled by conventions of any kind. O.K.'s letters were full of nostalgia for the innocence and vitality he felt had been lost to Europe under the crust of bourgeois sublimation. As an expressionist, he was one of the last children of Rousseau, and he idealized the noble savage within himself. That this savage was the cultural artifact of the middle classes whose values he longed to escape was no mean irony. Kokoschka's shenanigans failed to throw the burghers into the turmoil he hoped for, but they made an indelible impression on his friends, a circle that included the satirist Karl Kraus, the architect Adolf Loos and a galaxy of painters from Gustav Klimt to Wassily Kandinsky. His most eccentric episode was that of the doll. In the spring of 1912 he fell violently in love with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer and a pretentious man-eater. Their affair lasted three years, and she dumped him in favor of the architect Walter Gropius soon after Kokoschka enlisted in the imperial dragoons to fight in the first World War. This, combined with the horrors of the trenches and the shock of being shot and bayoneted nearly to death, drove O.K. over the brink. He had a Munich dollmaker construct a soft, life-size, redhaired effigy of his former lover, fetishistically complete in every anatomical detail. The doll shared his bed and during the day he would dress it up and take it out. In Self- Portrait with Doll, 1920-21, Kokoschka is seen pointing with a woebegone expression at its sexual parts, presumably to indicate a cooling of the one- sided affair. Eventually, after he and some friends got drunk, he "murdered" the doll and flung it on a garbage truck in Dresden: the dumper dumped.

In point of fact, the image of Kokoschka as a prophet martyred by the middle-class audience of Vienna and Berlin was far from the truth, despite the zeal with which he curated it. Kokoschka could rarely miss an opportunity to present himself in heroic silhouette on the barricades of culture. Thus, as Peter Vergo and Yvonne Modlin show in their catalog essay on O.K.'s work as a playwright, his own story of the first performance of his expressionist drama Murderer Hope of Women in Vienna in 1909 was fiction. In his 1971 memoirs he described a screaming audience, "foot-stamping, brawling and chair- brandishing," an impending fire, a riot of Balkan soldiers, his own near arrest and a chorus of savage reviews. Actually, the Viennese newspapers of the day reported amused theatergoers taking the play "as a piece of fun, with sympathetic good humor."

It is unlikely, however, that his Austrian sitters took their portraits the same way. There is still something disquieting about their effigies, pinned on the dark canvas in those peculiar scratchy tones, the flesh iridescent and yet as musty as a dead moth's wing, the fingers crooked like sickly vine prunings. Apart from a few ferrety, etiolated aristocrats with names like Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac, most of the people who were prepared to undergo the ratchetting of what Kokoschka called his "psychological tin opener" were fellow artists and intellectuals. These "black portraits" have perhaps been overpraised. They are irresolute in form and full of deices from Ensor, Schiele, Redon and Van Gogh. At their occasional best, as in O.K.'s portrait of Loos, Van Gogh's influence predominates, and the sticky coils of paint develop a high psychic pressure: Loos, riddled with syphilis, all twisting hands and hunted glare, seems ready to implode. But Kokoschka's ability to draw with paint, to sustain a rhythm of marks across the whole surface instead of niggling at patches, came out on the eve of the war in portraits like the brilliantly energetic Franz Hauer, 1914.

This intensity entered his work when Alma Mahler entered his life. In Two Nudes (The Lovers), 1913, O.K. and Alma embrace naked, full length, like arrested waltzers. In the enigmatic Knight Errant, 1914-15, with its creamy paint and cold prismatic colors, the artist is seen lying down exhausted in knight's armor, a pilgrim's scallop shell at his side, abandoned in a wilderness vaguely reminiscent of Altdorfer's high alpine views, while an angel extends a martyr's palm, and Alma lurks sirennaked in the middle distance. Here all the emotional threads are rolled together: Kokoschka's fear of the war, his sense of displacement and exile, his self-pity and his amorous miseries.

The 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 driven from his European paradise. He went to England and remained throughout the war. There he painted a number of harsh, hard-to-read political allegories, inspired by the cartoons of Gillray and other Georgian caricaturists, and supported himself by teaching and portraiture.

In the 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 there is the real sense of an old man's rage and an old man's freedom -- the sort of deliberate clumsiness by a highly gifted draftsman, the sense of the ludicrous posture, the gross energy of the old satyr, that fires up our responses when we look at a good late Picasso. Nowhere does this come out better than in Theseus and Antiope, the huge canvas he began in 1958 and worked on intermittently for 16 years, leaving it unfinished at the time of his death. If one can speak of neo-expressionism by an original expressionist, this painting is it. Everything about it, from the violently suffused colors to the lumpish drawing of the Amazon queen's feet, runs close to satire. Never, one suspects, has classical myth been rendered with such homely, indeed suburban, protagonists. But for the burning temples in the background one might suppose the scene was a Baltic beach in August. And yet it has a strange, mocking intensity: despite his official position, the old dog could still bite when left to his own subjects, far from the civic view and the official portrait, in his own studio.