The artist is wild and domestic – Newspaper Kommersant No. 1 (7446) of 01/09/2023

The Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris opened the exhibition “Oscar Kokoschka. Savage from Vienna”: 150 works, including 75 paintings by an outstanding Austrian artist of the 20th century. According to the correspondent of “Kommersant” in France Alexey Tarkhanov.

The name is clear: Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) had a reputation as a patented savage. Having set off to conquer Vienna, a native of tiny Pöchlarn, having shaved his head, irritated society with his scandals, novels, and paintings. He was considered an excellent portrait painter, special – his portraits were ordered by brave men who dared to look into their souls through his eyes. “I can see people through the skin,” said the artist. His friend, the architect Adolf Loos, even suggested that he buy those portraits that frightened customers still refuse.

At the beginning of the exhibition, his paintings show the characters of Imperial Vienna, who do not yet know what the 20th century has in store for them. Like the art critic, philanthropist, cultural trader of the creator of “Der Sturm” Herwart Walden (Georg Levin), whom Kokoschka considered “an absolute representative of modernity.” Ahead of the hero of the portrait of 1910 is glory in Germany, flight from fascism in the USSR and death in a Saratov prison in 1941.

A special section is devoted to his puppet novel, which entered the history of art and psychiatry. After parting with his girlfriend Alma Mahler, he ordered the theater artist Hermine Moos to depict the object of his crazy love in life size and with the most detailed details of the body. With this doll, he nursed everyone for show. Unlike the real Mahler, she was literally stuffed with a fool, obedient and dumb. Perhaps exactly what Kokoschka needed. After playing with her, he chopped her into pieces, cut off her head and threw it into the trash. As a memento of this, two magnificent self-portraits with a doll, in which the artist himself looks like a mannequin with a crazy frightened face and a huge chin of the Nutcracker.

After parting with his beloved, Kokoschka went to the front to serve in the dragoons, selling his famous pair portrait “Bride of the Wind” for the price of a cavalry horse. A photographic portrait of a handsome man in a high helmet is at the exhibition. He was wounded three times by Russian bullets and bayonets, was taken prisoner, and ended up as a front-line draftsman. Several graphic sheets depicting houses destroyed by shells and soldiers robbing a captured village are on display. Ordinary war, as it was and as it remains.

It’s hard to believe, but a veteran of the First World War, an acquaintance of Klimt and Schiele, a classic of art of the 20th century, is almost our contemporary. Born in 1886 in the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, the artist died in 1980 in quiet, real Switzerland. It is not so difficult to find consonance with our time in his work and biography. This is how one retrospective differs from another – not only in the selection of things, space and design, but also in context.

In times of peace, he traveled a lot, taught in Germany, enjoyed great prestige in his native Austria, his exhibitions were successful in England and France. Together with all of Europe, he knew both good years and bad ones. In the 1930s, Oskar Kokoschka was labeled a “degenerate artist” by Nazi art historians and was proud of this stigma as an enemy of the regime, although hundreds of his works were confiscated from museums and many perished. In 1934 he moved from Vienna to Prague, in Czechoslovakia, a former part of the empire. So Russian artists fled from the Bolsheviks to Finland, or Latvia, or Georgia. When the Nazis overtook him there, he left with his wife for England, where he spent the entire war.

Kokoschka supported immigrant groups that united German and Austrian artists and writers, their opposition to fascism outside the Reich, their desire to maintain the destroyed glory of the German language and German culture, but quarreled with both the “bad” and the “good”. The fee that he was due for a portrait of the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky, he demanded that the participants in the Battle of Stalingrad be sent for treatment: half to Soviet soldiers, half to German.

After the war, Kokoschka became a subject of Britain, regaining the rights of a free man with “iron documents”. With Austria, he reconciled, even accepted in the end solemnly returned citizenship to him, but neither Vienna nor Berlin attracted him anymore. Kokoschka preferred Switzerland, and not the German, but the French part of it. He lived near Montreux, admired Lake Leman, painted pictures. Forty-two years have passed since his death, his persecutors have long rotted away, his work is admired in Paris, then they will go to Bilbao.

In this retrospective, he appears as a very diverse artist, and not just a brilliant portrait painter. His landscapes are beautiful, in which he approaches portraits of cities and mountains with the same freedom: the Dolomites, Marseille, Prague are both recognizable and unfamiliar at the same time. The exhibition also shows his graphic sheets, and the scores of his operas, and the covers of his books. And his political allegories. During the Second World War, in his English immigration, he paints pictures in which he presents a world catastrophe in the form of everyday scenes, where countries depict heads of state or allegorical animals. The strange mise-en-scenes in which Churchill and Mussolini, Hitler and Roosevelt converged, the lion and the unicorn were the least suitable for propaganda, they were capable of confounding anyone but their creator. These things still look just as wild today. But much more worrisome.