The Expressionist movement in Germany covers the years leading up to the First World War, the War years and the period after Germany's defeat, humiliation and economic decline. The movement continues along its tortured path during the rise of Nazism, rejected as "degenerate art" by the Nazi establishment. Many artists leave Germany in those years, some for ever. One of the founders of the movement, Kirchner, commits suicide in 1938.
Neal McLaughlin, on Virtualology, defines German Expressionism as
"perhaps the most complex, diverse and saddest movement ever to be included in the history of Modern Art".
The young Oskar Kokoschka, a pupil of the more famous Klimt, contributed to the movement with his sketches, his painting, his dramas. Many of his writings, on the other hand, belong to a later period, in which the mature man, who fought in the First World War and had to leave his country during the Second, no longer feels sharp existential pain but denounces the effects of industrialization and globalization on humankind, content to LOOK but no longer willing to SEE.
Themes common to all forms of Kokoschka's artistic work
First and foremost, Kokoschka is always looking to expose underlying feelings, even those unconsciously suppressed. He is a loner, and disinterested in external appearances, whether his own or other people's. His work is only rarely fine and detailed; mostly he leaves the impression that he only wanted to give his viewer or listener a few well-directed hints and leave them to figure out the rest.
The second reappearing theme is different. It is Alma. Kokoschka had a brief love affair with Alma Maria Schindler, usually known as Alma Mahler. We find Alma in all his works, a veritable passion. Kokoschka met Alma (who posed for him) after she returned from New York with her husband Mahler, who by then was a very sick man. She was coming from years of marriage to a husband who for the world was a genius, but whom few women would choose as husband - perhaps unfaithful and surely despotic. The beautiful Alma was in a state of nervous exhaustion, and this could explain the tense face that Kokoschka sketched in several portraits, with witch-like pointed nose and chin. These portraits have an ethereal quality, as if the artist set out to make a Botticellian-type female image, but then decided to give expression to suffering and suppressed rage.
References to Alma appear in an almost adolescent way in some of his dramas. We find the expression "Allos Makar" written either sic in the text, or with Greek lettering, in several works. It is also the title of one of his poems. It is variously indicated as "Happiness is in the Other" or "Happiness is Otherwise", repeated rather often. Curiously this expression is an anagramme (almost) of Oskar and Alma.
The relationship was an unhappy one, and the tension between man and woman is another element of his work, often expressed as a failure of man to understand woman, erupting even into violence. Yet he is aware that woman is suffering, too, from this eternal conflict. Eurydike's spirit tells Orpheus: “The wolf thinks differently about the lamb, than the lamb feels about the one who has devoured it”.
Kokoschka the Dramatist
Kokoschka's Murderer Hope of Women (1907) is considered to be the first Expressionist drama. Not surprisingly, it met with storms of protest when played in theatre. Most of his dramatic works were written well before the onset of the First World War, but the climate of violence, pain, uncertainty that pervades his dramas makes them strong precursors of the tragic dark years of trench warfare that were to follow.
Describing life in Vienna during the war, Edmund De Waal recounts that in April 1916, soldiers on leave, survivors of the battle of Uscieczko on the Russian front, appeared on stage and re-enacted the events of the battle (The Hare with Amber Eyes, p. 191). This must have been close to Kokoschka's dramatic scenes, and their experiences must have been similar to those of the soldier Kokoschka, seriously wounded in Volhynia on the Russian front, left for dead by his men, taken prisoner by the Russians then freed days later in an Austrian blitz, so badly wounded that he was still in hospital one year later.
The figures of man and woman are constantly contraposed in Kokoschka's dramas, the man suffering and treating the woman with violence, a violence that increases as he feels the woman slip away from him, render ridiculous his attempts to possess her, physically and spiritually, or to force her to carry his child.
This was the story of his affair with Alma.
Kokoschka's Drawings
These are sketches, charcoal or ink, often with inks of different colours. Kokoschka made many portraits of friends and notable people met in the busy Vienna of the early twentieth century. He wastes no stroke of charcoal or pen unnecessarily, interested in capturing what is "under the skin" of his subjects.
Many early drawings were published in a new weekly cultural publication started in Berlin, called “Der Sturm”. Kokoschka worked for this publication for about a year between 1910-1911. His portraits had many of the characteristics of the caricature, aiming to express the personality, the hidden thoughts, at a time when the portrait was expected to be a sort of bourgeois status symbol. Needless to say, his sketched portraits were not always appreciated, and he left “Der Sturm” after about a year, although remaining in contact and in1916, while recovering from his war wounds, he published another series of portraits, often with brush strokes instead of pen.
Although many of these faces were of artists and friends, including prominent figures such as Adolf Loos and Else Laske-Schueler, in his search to bring out every kind of underlying feelings, he also made many portraits of the inmates of the Steinhof mental hospital (see Madness and Modernity -- Book Review by Frances Spiegel on Suite101).
Kokoschka the Painter
Kokoschka is best known as a painter. In fact his formal studies were in art, and he taught painting and drawing for many years, up to a ripe old age.
Kokoschka's most famous painting, Die Windsbraut (Bride of the Wind), also called The Tempest, depicts himself holding a sleeping Alma in his arms, cradled in a small boat, while a windstorm whisks them away. The dominant colour of the painting is blue, giving a spiritual, unearthly tone to their love. The bride is pale, moon-like, smooth, sleeping. The man's expression is tender. But the effect of the painting is that of a great love disappearing forever into the storm.
Besides his own numerous paintings, Oskar Kokoschka taught painting. From 1920 to 1924, he was Professor at the Dresden Academy of Art, after which he travelled, then returned to Vienna, before moving on to Prague where he met Olda Pavlovska who became his wife. In Prague, he took Czech citizenship (his father was originally from Czechoslovakia). For some time the couple felt safe from the increasing Nazi influence in Austria, until Czechoslovakia too became unsafe and in 1938 the couple moved to London. After the war, the Kokoschka's returned to Austria and from 1953 to 1963 he set up his School of Seeing, a painting school aiming to teach young artists observation rather than technical merit.
Kokoschka the Writer
Kokoschka's prose writings are almost "prosaic" compared with his dramas, and he does actually manage to poke just a little fun at himself. One such short story is My Daughter Virginia (a first version of which appeared in Paris in 1939, whereas the final version was published in 1947 after his London years). In this story he and another lonely old man invent a daughter whom they look after jointly. Virginia eventually walks out on them, and the pair quarrel over who was to blame.
In the introduction to the story, he describes himself and his friend, an out-of-work actor, “sitting in a freezing garret warming their hands on cups of tea” and “sublimating their hunger” . Perhaps even after many years and his marriage to Olda Pavlovska, this desire for a daughter is a mature elaboration of his desire to have children with Alma. She was in fact pregnant with his child, more than once, but she did not carry on the pregnancies, and Oskar exacted revenge from her with some shockingly vicious and explicit paintings and drawings.
This same short story contains the gentle irony of maturity, and perhaps quite a strong self-criticism. He writes “Artists have always known how to go hungry, yet no generation found so many technical-artistical expressions for the artistic sublimation of hunger, as ours did. Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and so on nourished an entire generation of art writers, until Herr Rosenberg, the aesthetic authority of the Third Reich, cleared matters up by declaring the whole lot to be swindle and degenerate.”
This is a far cry indeed from his early dramas, such as Orpheus and Eurydike, which he wrote between 1915 and 1918. After his severe war wounds, as he wrote to the publisher, this piece had been “spoken, whispered in ecstasy, in delirium, wept, implored, howled in fear and fever, close to death”.
Many writings are explanatory or accessory to some of his painted works.
His long life adds multiple interest to his works in all fields, from the pain and angst of youth, the shock and violence of war, the experience of living abroad during the Second World War, the disenchanted maturity with which he watched society change, as in the excellent Bild, Sprache und Schrift (Picture, Speech and Writing), 1947.
In this work he describes the paradox “when we try to fix with words and definitions what we have forgotten to see and experience.”
Many concepts are reminiscent of contemporary works such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The acute pain of the early works has given way to the cold realization of what globalization is doing to mankind. Like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, Kokoschka points to the increasing use of acronyms (his list includes NATO and GESTAPO) to detach social, political, economical, administrative units from a clear generalized understanding of their reality. He ends this essay:
“I believe the only way out of this catastrophe, into which technical civilization has thrown us, is: to see, to learn to realize (see inside), instead of being a fatalistic spectator.”
In fact, after this, he worked to set up the painting school called School of Seeing.
Kokoschka: War Hero or not?
Although all accounts of Kokoschka's life include the serious injuries he sustained at the front, there are some questions regarding his motives: did he volunteer immediately for war out of patriotism and sense of duty? Or was his decision to enroll in the army a gesture prompted by the end of his love affair with Alma?
Did he make the most of his wounds to be invalided out of the army, perhaps suffering really from shell-shock? According to the account of his military history given by Austro-Hungarian Army, a UK website, he was seriously a hero. Certain it is that he suffered head injuries which made his life difficult for years afterwards.
For all his opening of his own soul, all his expression, he remained in many ways a shy and private person, sometimes dismissed as “shallow”. Perhaps the very wide range of his work gives this impression.
Sources:
- Portraetzeichnungen von Oskar Kokoschka - Buchheim Verlag - Feldafing - chosen and introduced by Hans Maria Wingler (1954)
- Schriften by Oskar Kokoschka - Writings introduced by Hans Maria Wingler - Fischer Buecherei (1964)
- Note: the quotations from Kokoschka's writings are my own translation, from the original German of the above work.
Valerie Wilson - Valerie Wilson has lived, studied and worked in Scotland, Germany and Italy; mainly employed in multi-national companies in shipping ...
