two artists and two political choices
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At the Albertina Modern in Vienna, the exhibition “Herbert Böckl – Oskar Kokoschka: Rivalry” is open, comparing the works of two masters of Austrian modernism, who stood on a common aesthetic and opposing political positions. One was forced by political intransigence to emigrate, while another was allowed by political flexibility to work calmly in his homeland under different political regimes.
It would seem, what kind of “rivalry” could there be here? The name Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) is known to everyone who is interested in art; the name of Herbert Böckl (1894–1966) is known only to art historians, and only to Austrian ones. Kokoschka entered the world history of art long before his death, but Böckl will never make it into it. About Kokoschka – one novel with Alma Mahler is enough – you can write a bestseller and make a biopic; nothing can be squeezed out of Böckl’s life except a dry scientific monograph. Either it’s due to the peculiarities of the Albertina collection, on the basis of which the exhibition is based, or the Albertina is quite deliberately playing along with Böckle, who has a quantitative and qualitative advantage in the exhibition, but if the viewer honestly and impartially looks at the graphics (paintings are also on display – there are not many of them, and it is not representative) of both artists, he will be forced to admit that these are fighters in the same weight category. Moreover, if both names suddenly mean nothing to the viewer, he should rightly conclude that Böckl as a draftsman is almost better: he has a marvelous, “Blue Riders” sense of color – from his watercolors it is clear how he loves and understands Kandinsky, and pathological studies of 1931 are something out of the ordinary.
Böckl was then working on the painting “Anatomy”, a modern paraphrase of Rembrandt’s “anatomy lessons”, and at the invitation of the head physician of the Franz Josef Hospital, he painted in the hospital dissection room – more than 70 drawings in Italian pencil have been preserved, and they, despite their preparatory nature, seem to be independent work. The studies, together with the painting “Anatomy” (it is stored in the Vienna Museum and did not come to the exhibition) are considered to be one of the peaks of Austrian expressionism, but this is not the early, youthful, deliberately expressive expressionism of Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl, but the late, mature, restrained , is no longer so much expressionism as existentialism. Sketches of the corpses of women, men, old people, babies, whom oblivion equalized in rights with one cut from the jugular notch to the pubis, are made directly, without embellishment, without following learned compositional schemes and ornamental tricks, and leave the contemplator alone with the thought of inevitability – in the same loneliness as a lonely person in the face of death. The artist was a deeply religious Catholic, painted churches with expressionist frescoes, became one of the main reformers of religious painting in Austria, but the drawings from the dissecting room seem to indicate the absolute abandonment of humanity by God, and when they were first made – in 1948, Vienna was still in ruins , – was exhibited, a terrible scandal occurred, critics and the public perceived this essay on the mortality of the flesh as a work on the topic of the day (Böckl, back in the 1920s, began to patronize Otto Benesch, one of the major art critics of the Viennese school, who was forced to flee after the Anschluss and returned to his homeland in 1947 to head the Albertina; Böckl’s exhibition was one of the first in Benes’ program). Today, Böckl’s pathological suite looks like a connecting link between the dances of love and death in the graphics of Secession artists and Viennese actionists; this is a whole chapter in the history of Austrian art. But if both Kokoschka and Böckl are called the greatest masters of expressionism in Austria, then where did this inequality in fame and fortune come from?
The obvious answer is that it’s all about the eight-year age difference. Although Kokoschka and Böckl are called artists of the same generation, this definition is not entirely accurate: the first became, if not a European, then certainly an all-German celebrity before the Great War, in the fortunate circumstances of the time and place for the avant-garde; the second, due to his age, did not manage to do anything significant before the Sarajevo shot, except that he failed the exams at the Vienna Academy of Arts (years later he would head it as rector). Böckl is often called self-taught – he had to study as an architect at the Technical University, however, thanks to his architectural studies, he met Adolf Loos, from whom he took private drawing lessons. Böckl had no other teachers – or rather, his teachers were Schiele, Kokoschka, the Germans (The Blue Rider more so than The Bridge), and the Parisians: all his life he traveled a lot, preferring to study directly, in situ – from the ancient Egyptians, the Minoans, the old masters in the Louvre or the artists of the Parisian school in Montparnasse (Böckle became very friendly with Ossip Zadkine). At the same time, he did not imitate anyone, he went his own way, maintaining an originality that was amazing in the absence of school and such a highly artistic environment. Loos, by the way, also patronized the young Kokoschka – at the exhibition there is a famous portrait of Loos, which Kokoschka, seriously wounded at the front, painted in 1916, while lying in a Vienna infirmary, and on which Loos wrote with his own hand “this image is more like me than myself.” Loos is the only point at which the biographies of the “rivals” accidentally converge. Both ended up at the front in 1914: the whole of Vienna monitored the health of Kokoschka, undermined by injury, shell shock and a break with Alma Mahler; no one knew about Böckl, who had not received a scratch, although during the war his first masterpiece appeared – a portrait of a fellow countryman, a fellow soldier and, from the time of the front-line acquaintance, a close friend of Bruno Grimschitz, an art critic who, under the Nazis, would occupy a number of key positions and begin to play an important, albeit not an orthodox party cultural role (the portrait of Grimschitz hangs in the Belvedere). Böckl’s career rise will begin only after the Great War, when the circumstances of the time and place will be very successful for him: a rotation of personnel will happen by itself – some, like Klimt and Schiele, will be carried away by the Spanish flu, others, like Kokoschka, will leave the country – and he will turn out to be the first expressionist brush of the new republic.
The answer, which is not obvious on the surface, is that it’s all about conformism. No, God forbid, not in the sense of art: both Kokoschka and Böckl stood on the same aesthetic positions – avant-garde, modernism, not a step back. Judging by the exhibition, Böckl was perhaps even more radical – in any case, after the Second World War, when Kokoschka had strange turns to both the classics (studies from Michelangelo’s Slaves) and nature (watercolor bouquets), Böckl was fascinated by abstraction , and he became one of the heralds of informel in Austria. But politically they found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades, and this was only partly their own choice – in many ways, this happened at the whim of history. In 1934, the non-party anti-fascist Kokoschka left Austria – first to Prague, then to London. Böckl stayed: unlike Kokoschka, whose love affairs make such an impression on fiction writers and journalists, he, a Catholic, was married once and for all, he and his wife had nine children – a large family is not conducive to emigration. Under Austrofascism, the Catholic Böckl lived well: the stupid scandal with the fresco in the Maria-Saal Cathedral, where Lenin was identified in the image of St. Peter, was long forgotten, he successfully worked for the church, represented Austria at the Venice Biennale and the World Exhibition in Brussels, received state prizes, he, who did not have an artist’s diploma, was given a class at the Vienna Academy. He had no aesthetic disagreements with the regime – a slight embarrassment at the Brussels World Exhibition, where he showed Rubens’ blood-red Donna Gravida, a portrait of his beloved wife, pregnant with their fifth child, presented in full length and completely naked, does not count: the public was outraged by the freedom of Austrian morals, the king awarded the painter the Order of Leopold. However, the real political divergence between Kokoschka and Böckl began after the Anschluss.
After 1938, Kokoschka’s painting turns into an anti-fascist political poster, Böckl’s painting goes into internal emigration, so as not to let the National Socialist ideology one iota into the sphere of his pure, uncompromising modernism. It was Kokoschka, who became famous in Germany even before the First World War, who became a prominent exponent of “Degenerate Art”; Böckl, essentially no less “degenerate”, voluntarily disappeared from the zone of any visibility: he refused a professorship at the academy, limiting himself to evening drawing classes with the nude nature (he had to feed his family), did not exhibit, painted portraits of his wife, children and Styrian mountains. But in 1941 he joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Apparently, to get rid of it. Probably following the example of Grimschitz, who joined the NSDAP immediately after the Anschluss, Grimschitz was soon appointed director of the Austrian Gallery (the current Belvedere), the collection of which was immediately replenished with works by Böckl, quite “degenerate”. However, Grimshitz played a double game, purchasing not only underground modernists, but also those who were openly exhibited at “Degenerate Art”; in response to the orders of the Ministry of Education to remove the works of Jews and foreigners from the exhibition, he replied that he would be glad, but there was no room in the storerooms , in general, the art critic in him defeated the party member, and after 1945 he lost all his high posts, but did not lose his head. In May 1945 we find the name of Böckl, appointed rector of the Academy of Arts, where he immediately carried out a modernist reform, among the founders of the Austrian-Soviet Friendship Society. He hid the fact of his membership in the NSDAP (as a result of which he lost his rector’s post, but after the trial he did not receive any charges of collaborating with Nazism, and shortly before his death he returned to rector at the academy). He continued to represent Austria at biennales and world exhibitions, receiving prizes, orders and honorary orders. Continued to be considered the main Austrian expressionist. True, only within Austria, said sarcastic critics, pointing out that if according to the Hamburg account, then the main Austrian artist of the 20th century lives next door, in Switzerland. After World War II, they tried to lure Kokoschka back: they promised mountains of gold, returned his citizenship – he, of course, did not have any Austrian registration, which was required to obtain citizenship, so Federal Chancellor Bruno Kreisky registered the artist with himself. The stubborn Kokoschka did not return, died in a foreign land, the country’s main art prize was established in the year of his death and named after him.
“Herbert Böckl – Oskar Kokoschka: rivalry.” Albertina Modern, Vienna, until March 17
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