Kokoschka: The Untimely Modernist by Rüdiger Görner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kokoschka: The Untimely Modernist by Rüdiger Görner Claude Cernuschi Kokoschka: The Untimely Modernist. By Rüdiger Görner. Trans. by Debra S. Marmor and Herbert A. Danner. London: Haus Publishing. 2022. 352 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978–1912208814. Among art historians, biography enjoys a far from stellar reputation. If T. J. Clark openly declared his 'hatred' of the genre during a symposium on social art history in 1997, it was, presumably, because life histories (however thorough) frequently side-step the socio-political dimension of works of art. Biographers raise serious questions to be sure, but often sustain the 'great man' version of history, yielding to the temptation of lionizing artists as exceptional individuals who outpace the cultures from which they spring. Whether Rüdiger Görner's new study — an English translation of Oskar Kokoschka: Jahrhundertkünstler, published in 2018 by Zsolnay — will dispel these suspicions is difficult to say. But one may question the necessity for yet another biography of enfant terrible Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. One says 'yet another' because four such studies already exist (Edith Hoffmann, Oskar Kokoschka: Life and Work, 1947; J. P. Hodin, Oskar Kokoschka: The Artist and His Time: A Biographical Study, 1966; Frank Whitford, Oskar Kokoschka: A Life, 1986; and Susanne Keegan, The Eye of God: A Life of Oskar Kokoschka, 1999). And while all acknowledge their predecessors, not one graces the bibliography of Görner's latest addition to the list (though Hoffmann's is cited in several footnotes). Surely, these antecedents do not deserve so ungenerous an omission, especially as the first two, for all their imperfections, relied on first-hand interactions with the artist himself. Granted, there is no shortage of revisionist embellishment, even downright fabulation, in Kokoschka's recollections (something his early biographers fully acknowledge). But the artist's direct testimony proved extremely valuable in elucidating the symbolism of his rather obscure wartime allegories. Without these elucidations, upon which Görner himself relies, hermetic pieces such as The Red Egg, The Crab or What We Are Fighting For would have remained largely unintelligible. Additionally, one might regret the rapidity with which Görner glosses over Kokoschka's formative years in Vienna, especially as these marked the important intellectual mentorship of Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus. No less pivotal was his subsequent sojourn in Berlin, during which he worked for the avantgarde periodical Der Sturm under the tutelage of Herwarth Walden. As deeply and enduringly as Alma Mahler's rejection wounded him, and as bizarre as his ill-fated attempt to commission a life-size doll to 'recreate' his lover may strike contemporary audiences, Kokoschka's connection to these important [End Page 199] cultural figures (and his place in the polemical debates they initiated) warrants comparable attention. Given Görner's literary background, and how seriously Kokoschka turned to theatrical endeavours, the study is stronger when outlining the artist's relationship with writers such as, say, Georg Trakl, Richard Dehmel, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann. Equally welcome is his allowing the artist's ties with musicians to emerge in sharper relief: composers such as Ernst Křenek, Gottfried von Einem and Werner Egk, performers such as Yehudi Menuhin and Pablo Casals and directors such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, not just the usual suspects such as Schönberg, Berg and Webern. Görner is also effective when stressing the importance of pedagogy in Kokoschka's overall worldview: his lifelong fidelity to the principles of John Amos Comenius, and his commitment to his pupils' freedom to create in unconventional ways (which got him into trouble on more than one occasion). Since Kokoschka's writings on art prove rather nebulous, impeding the emergence of a lucid, workable aesthetic philosophy, his teaching practice provides a more useful entry point into his thought process, all the more so as he, perhaps naively, considered teaching to be a powerful political as much as pedagogical tool. Conveniently, the discussion of his teaching provides a natural segue into Görner's useful account of Kokoschka's activities in the public sphere, and of his lifelong political engagement. Against this backdrop, what emerges most sharply from Görner's biography is Kokoschka's complex, contradictory...