Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven/New Insights and Perspectives ed. by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold

Abstract

Reviewed by: Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven/New Insights and Perspectives ed. by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold Sonja Niederacher Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold, eds., Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven/New Insights and Perspectives. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. 450 pp. Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold's volume Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven: New Insights and Perspectives tells of the proceedings of an international conference bearing the same title, which was held at the University of Applied Arts Vienna on February 27, 2020. All articles are alternately in German and English. The conference organizers and editors of the book are well-known figures in the field: Bonnefoit, now a full professor at the Institute for Art History and Museology at the University of Neuchâtel, served as a curator for the Fondation Oskar Kokoschka in Vevey for ten years from 2006 to 2016. Reinhold has been the director of the Oskar Kokoschka Center at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 2008 and authored the 2022 biography on the artist under the title Oskar Kokoschka und Österreich. Both editors have contributed significantly to the scholarly discourse on the artist and have taken part in shaping the basis they now can build on to explore "new insights and perspectives" on Kokoschka. Equally distinguished in their fields of expertise are the contributors to this volume. As is made clear in the introduction, the main intention was to confront the myths surrounding Oskar Kokoschka, of which there are many. The guiding question was whether and to what extent Kokoschka himself was the creator of these legends about his life and thus whether these are basically the result of self-promotion. The authors take up this approach and deliver manifold studies on Kokoschka's art and biography. The eleven articles are grouped in five chapters. Under the title "Self-positioning and Marketing Strategies," Birgit Kirchmayr analyzes how the artist contrived his autobiographical writings to represent the topos of an artist's life. Keith Holz meticulously lays out Kokoschka's efforts to gain ground in the US art market. Oskar Kokoschka's famous doll that was modeled after his former lover, Alma Mahler, demands contextualization in gender discourse, a task fulfilled by Reinhold herself, who interprets dolls as a "figuration of Modernism." Katharina Prager elucidates the whirling gender discourses in Vienna at the turn of the century, fortunately guiding the reader away from the misogynistic writings of Oskar Weininger, which have long dominated the retrospective perception of the [End Page 114] period (primarily for their shock potential) and instead offers more diverse elaborations of the subject. Anna Stuhlpfarrer and Barbara Lesák portray in their texts Oskar Kokoschka in other roles, as playwright, director, and set designer, again showing Kokoschka's constant efforts to shape his image retrospectively (Stuhlpfarrer) and the artist's struggle with gender relations in his expressionist plays (Lesák). Aglaja Kempf analyzes the influence of "Japonisme," so fashionable in Vienna at the time of Kokoschka's work, which is actually the only art-historical text on the artist's paintings. Whereas the text on Japanese aesthetics as well as those that deal with gender questions look at theories and concepts that emerged from society as a whole, the text on the sixteenth-century reformer and educator Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky), written by Bonnefoit, shows Kokoschka's very personal source of inspiration. Based on Comenius' writings, Kokoschka developed his concept of "seeing," as realized in his annual seminars held at the International Summer Academy for Visual Arts in Salzburg, called "Schule des Sehens." Kokoschka's postulate of the artist's role as "eye-opener" also derives from Comenius. Günter Berghaus explores the reception of German Expressionism in Brazil exemplified in a production of "Murderer, Hope of Women" in Rio de Janeiro in 1997, directed by the author himself. This broad approach that allows multiple perspectives on the artist and his oeuvre has proven fruitful. Likewise, new hitherto unexplored archival sources enable interpretations from different angles, as shown in the first chapter, on Kokoschka's political engagement. Ines Rotermund-Reynard draws from her research in the Moscow Special Archive to depict the artist's...