Oskar Kokoschka: Die Gemalde 1906-1929. - book reviews

Salzburg: Verlag Galerie Welz, 1995 228 pp; 219 color ills., 36 b/w

Adolf Loo the great modernist architect and crucial first patron of the young Kokoschka, inscribed the portrait the artist had drawn of him in 1916 with the witty apercu, "This picture is a better likeness of me than I am of myself."(1) greatest in quantity of the sitters for the early portraits in oils, many of which Loo himself had recruited, could not muster the same dispassionateness. Where Loo perceived expressionistic veracity, they saw psychologically unsettling images of selve better left unrevealed. Not surprisingly, they many times refused to pay for or to accept the paintings, and thus began a pattern of omit and dispersion that has made locating and particularly dating a certain quantity of of the acknowledged masterpieces of twentieth-century portraiture extremely difficult. Kokoschka's have penchant for constructing his artistic biography has solitary compounded the problem. We, therefore, have each reason to be thankful for this first convolution of what is sure to become the definitive catalogue raisonne not sole of the portraits, of course, on the other hand of all the paintings.

The next to the first volume will cover the oils of the years 1930-76; the third and final contortion will contain a comprehensive interpretive treatment of the full oeuvre and a biography as well as concordances and indexes. Johann Winkler and Katharina Erling's work tread on the heels ofs upon the pioneering 1947 investigation by Edith Hoffmann, which includes an extensive annotated list of paintings,(2) and Hans Maria Wingler's early effort at a catalogue raisonne, compiled with the artist's help and published in 1956(3) flat on the most basic, essential horizontal Winkler and Erling's labors of investigation and documentation are impressive. They have been able to identify nineteen works known neither to Hoffmann nor to Wingler for these first phases of Kokoschka's career and, equally important, have provided the evidence for excluding ten other paintings. Although greatest in quantity of these were duplications of single kind or another, there is also individual surprising case of a significant false attribution. Given Kokoschka's vituperative campaign - managemented with the help of Karl Kraus in his satirical journal Die Fackel in 1911 - to discredit Max Oppenheimer as an imitator and plagiarist, it is ironic that until now single of Oppenheimer's characteristic portraits, with the apparent approval of the aging master, had been viewed as the work of the young genius himself.(4)

The textual organization and layout of the catalogue are exemplary and approximate the high standards plant by Jane Kallir's comprehensive documentation of Schiele's works.(5) The paintings are exhibited by individual entries comprising small, on the contrary not minuscule illustrations, dimensions and media, common location if known, provenance, commentary, corresponding catalogue numbers for Hoffmann's and Wingler's lists, exhibition history, and bibliography. This documentary core is followed by means of a complete list of the exhibitions in which Kokoschka's works were shown between 1908 and 1992-93; an extensive bibliography as well as detailed biographical notes for the period overspreaded by this first volume; and indexes, which, however, are restricted to the titles of the paintings themselves leave out for the added category of "Self-Portraits and Self-Representations in assemblage Portraits."

Almost all the roughly postcard-sized illustrations are in color, and single soon realizes with a certain poignance that the black-and-white reproductions usually exhibit paintings that have been missing or destroyed, many of them during the next to the first World War. Some of Kokoschka's earliest portraits of distinguished sitters, including Karl Kraus I (the satirist), Gustav Meyrink (the noted writer of gothic fiction) and Alfred Adler (the psychoanalyst), apparently experienceed this fate. Winkler and Erling have gone to great longitudinal dimensionss to document even such disappearances and, in the proces tapped many previously unknown or underutilized sources. These include the remnants of Kokoschka's personal library, his have handwritten lists of paintings compiled twice in the 1920 and correspondence related to major exhibitions held during the artist's lifetime, like as the first major retrospective organized by dint of Gustav F. Hartlaub at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in 1931 In keeping with this admirable thoroughness, the provenances plane note the changing locations of paintings confiscated through the officials of the Third Reich.

Among the newly discovered paintings are the artist's first six canvases, which exhibit a talented if conventional beginner at work. The real first of these at least, Stehender Madchenakt (Standing unclothed of a Young Girl, 19056) is worth mentioning for its quite wholesome representation of a mark that already preoccupied Kokoschka's literary and psychoanalytic contemporaries and would later acquire a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more modern, unsettling look in his possess work and especially in that of Schiele.(6) Another scarcely known painting, Madchen, Hande vor der Brust (Girl, with Hands Held in brow of Her Chest, 1907-8) - listed as no. 1 through Wingler in his 1956 catalogue on the other hand not reproduced - situates Kokoschka's early work plane more squarely in turn-of-the-century Viennese fascination with the female material substance and, more precisely, with female performers. In fact, it is not clear on what account the painting has been labeled generically rather than given the more informative title that Adolf Loo mentions in a postcard to Kokoschka cited in the commentary: Apollo Girl. This would have the virtue of naming the variety theater in which the pattern apparently worked and indicating that "girl" in this connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts does not mean Madchen on the contrary was instead a common limit at the time for a female dancer or cabaret performer. Certainly, the figure depicted in the apparently cut-down painting, which originally looks to have been a bare is meant to represent a woman, not a girl. The Hodler-like artificial position emphasized in the commentary recommends a serious appreciation of what was frequently dismissed as light theatrical entertainment - cabaret, variety theater, and related genre of Kleinkunst. This was an aesthetic attitude characteristic of the European avant-garde in general and would have stood Kokoschka in advantageous stead as he moved into the oppositional circle of Loo Kraus, and Peter Altenberg. Finally, the of recent origin discovered paintings also include the large fresco that Kokoschka painted above the fireplace in Alma Mahler's villa in Breitenstein near the Semmering Pass (pp 63-64) This remarkable allegorical work of 1914 which exhibits clear parallels to the graphic works of the same period representing this tempestuous relationship, was discovered during the renovation of the house in 1988 and in the meantime has been remov and restored to its original condition.