Art, Politics and Art History: Kokoschka Lost and Found in Three New Studies

Abstract

Art, Politics and Art History: Kokoschka Lost and Found inThree New Studies LEO A. LENSING Wesleyan University Re/Casting Kofascf?ca. Ethics and Aesthetics,Epistemologa and Politics inFin-de-Si?cle Vienna. By Claude Cernuschi. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 239 pp. $59.50. isbn 0-8386-3905-4. Oskar Kohschka. ?ben und Werk By Heinz Spielmann. Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst. 2003. 535 pp. 128,00. isbn 3-832i-7320-x. Oskar Kohschka. Kunst undPolitik 1937-1950. By Gloria Sultano and Patrick Werkner. Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: B?hlau. 2003. 360 pp. 35,00. isbn 3-205-77030-7. 'Schiele vielleicht, aber Klimt nicht, Kokoschkaja, Gersd nein.' [Schiele perhaps, but not Klimt, Kokoschka yes, Gersd no.] Thomas Bernhard, AlteMeister The apodictic aesthetic judgments ofReger, Bernhard's cantankerous music critic in the novel AlteMeister [OldMasters, 1985], are beguilingly iconoclastic. When he calls Klimt a 'Kitschmaler' [painter of kitsch] or categorizes Schiele as an overrated artist, it is tempting actually to entertain these opinions rather than dismiss them out of hand ? and, of course, to ponder the sub sequent remark that Kokoschka was the 'only really important, so to speak, really great' Austrian painter of the twentieth century.1 Yet the current sense of the reputation of these three great artists of the last days of the Austro Hungarian Empire runs in an entirely different direction. Even given the vagaries of supply and demand, the auction house and the art market have long seemed more interested inKlimt and Schiele. Major exhibitions of the last two decades, particularly those that have sought to consolidate Austrian identity in art and design rather than in literature and politics, have favoured Kokoschka's beloved father figure and the one brother painter whose 1 Thomas Bernhard, AlteMeister (Frankfurt a. M., 1985), pp. 225-26. 'In der Qualit?t Schieies hat es ja in diesem Jahrhundert mehrere ?sterreichische Maler gegeben, aber au?er Kokoschka keinen einzigen wirklich bedeutenden, sozusagen wirklich gro?en' [There have been several Austrian painters of Schiele 's quality this century, but apart from Kokoschka not one really significant one, not one really great one, so to speak]. LEO A. LENSING 257 reputation at least he came to hate with fratricidal intensity. In one of a number of similarly worded statements made in the 1960s, he referred to Schiele as ca bloody imitator von Klimt und mir, Pornograph dazu' [a bloody imitator ofKlimt and me, and a pornographer as well]. In the face of such a belated, violent reaction, it is possible to forget tem porarily that Schiele died in 1918,but Kokoschka lived and painted on almost until his death in 1980. Indeed, the historical dimensions of his life and work are so vast that they have effectively forestalled anything resem bling a critical study of the entire uvre. Frank Whitford's Oskar Kohschka (1986),one of thebest studiesavailable inEnglish, is subtitled Life', yet scarcely touches on the last fiftyyears of the artist's long, productive career. Werner J. Schweiger's seminal documentation, Der junge Kokoschka,t?en und Werk igo4~igi4 (1983), which exhibited more truth in labelling, was one of the firstmonographs to begin what ? to judge from further revelations in two of the books under consideration here ? will continue to be an ongoing project of d?mystification and demythologization. All studies of Kokoschka owe an immense debt to Edith Hoffmann's pioneering study Kohschka. Life and Work (1947), written in collaboration with the artist but also in ardent contention with his penchant for fictionalizing the past. Indeed, we are only now entering an era inwhich biographical studies ofKokoschka will be pub lished without the explicit or implicit imprimatur of the subject. The uvre catalogue of the paintings by Johann Winkler and Katharina Erling, Oskar Kohschka. Die Gem?lde igo6-ig2g (1995), which unfortunately seems to have stalled after the first volume, consolidates much useful information about models, patrons and collectors up until 1929. Tobias G. Natter's documenta tion in his recent catalogue Oskar Kokoschka. Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin igog-igi4 (2002) provides an even richer contextual framework for forty of the early portraits. The weightiest, ifnot necessarily themost substantial of these...